Chris’ Blog

The sermon this past Sunday really made me think about praising God in a different way. The speaker said that our purpose in life is to glorify God, and one of the ways we do that is by praising Him. Then he said that it seems strange that God would create us for the purpose of prasing Him, as if God created us out of vanity. I’ve wondered about this myself.

But then he said that part of being able to truly enjoy something is prasing it. We do it all the time when we talk about a sport we really like or a person we love. Praising completes enjoyment. It’s just as much for our benefit and maybe more so. If I feel that praising God is a chore and seems awkward, then maybe what it really means is that I’m not enjoying being with Him.

I’m not sure if that is theologically correct, but that’s what I understood.

I’ve had some experience with Apache 2, mostly adding aliases. For the multi-blog setup for Wordpress, I wanted to use virtual document roots, but still be able to set up aliases for the main website.

For example, I want chris.northfolk.ca or christine.northfolk.ca or john or tim or whoever.northfolk.ca to use a virtual document root specified /var/srv but www.northfolk.ca to use the default /var/www for a document root and still be able to add aliases for www.northfolk.ca that aren’t available for the blogs.

In the end, it was very simple, but took several hours to figure out (as is usually the case). All I had to do was rename /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default to 002-default. Then specify ServerName www.northfolk.ca under the VirtualRoot section. I also removed the NameVirtualHost heading because Apache will report an error if this exists twice and specify port 80 becuase Apache does not allow * and *:80 to coexist.

#NameVirtualHost *

ServerName www.northfolk.ca
ServerAlias northfolk.ca

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /var/www/
…

Then I created a new file 001-wordpress to allow for virtual document roots:

NameVirtualHost *:80

UseCanonicalName Off
VirtualDocumentRoot /srv/www/%0
Options All

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All

Apache will try to match the virtual server with the higher number file first, then fall back to the lowest number file. So if the hostname is www.northfolk.ca or northfolk.ca Apache will use the 002 file, and if it is anything else it will fall back to the 001 file. This will allow me to add new blogs without having to modify the Apache configuration files. I only need to add a link at /var/srv/

I’ve registered northfolk.ca with easyDNS for the home of our new website. I chose them because they had a well organised website and I knew they supported dynamic DNS, which is a requirement for me. The cost of a static IP in Shanghai is RMB 1500 per month (about $210) and 10X the cost of a regular ADSL connection.

The plan for the website is to have the regular, static content (transfered from www.acmeart.com/~chris) running on zope and a blog section running on wordpress.

I’ll offer a blog to any member of my family and hope to be able to have a summary page combining several blogs together.

I have a blog! Thought you might like to know.