Things have got a bit delayed with the roll-out of the new site. This was partly due to unforeseen problems - somehow it took two full days to debug some of the glitches with the email system, simple though it is - but also because web server administration is a big and somewhat fascinating topic. If you're new at it like me you can get sucked into learning a zillion tricks to do anything and everything. And if you're overly paranoid like me you kind of thing you have to. [wink]

I'm now up to the point where I've got all the basic systems working. Web server, email, basic log reports and the all-critical backup systems seem to work fine. The daily backups are what I find most reassuring. Even if I need to do a complete rebuild of the entire system, I should only lose at most two days worth of data (worst case is when my daily backups are completely out of sync; time zones are hard to get perfect!). The only caveat is that at the moment I still need to get the backups manually. I'd going to set up an automated system on my local machine but since I don't have a computer online 24/7 there's always going to be weak point there. I either need to set up a local server, some other form of online backup or just be prepared to eat losses if I'm away from my desk for extended periods of time.

The main thing I need to do now is figure out what content I should launch with. I'm thinking "launch" might be too grand a word for what it's going to be. Probably an effectively empty home page and a developer blog, really. It's something to build on, sure, but it's not exactly the sort of material you could see balloons and streamers being released for.

Apart from that, I've got a few tweaks I need to make to my blog theme to make it look slightly less spartan. I've also got to test the thing in Internet Explorer as I know it's broken (again! stupid IE). And, possibly more expensively, I'm going to rebuild the whole system again from scratch. Part of me doesn't like having to go through all the hassle of rebuilding the system again, but I told myself I was going to do it when I started. There's a bunch of fundamental changes I want to make to the setup - partitioning and so on - that's easier to do at the beginning. Plus I need to make sure I can actually do a complete rebuild if I'm forced in the future to do it.

All in all, I know I'll have a new blog to post in by the start of next week at the very latest. It will probably be much earlier, but Popcap just released Plants vs. Zombies today so this morning I'm doing a bit of market research. [smile]