It’s easy, it’s fun and everyone has got one. What? A blog, of course!
In order to get a new blog, you practically have two sole choices: get one from a blog farm (myspace.com,wordpress.com,blogger.com) or set up one over a server of yours.
Actually, there is a third major way too: you get a free/paid hosting service and set up your blog there. However, this is valid only for those who don’t drool over linux server administration and/or have to guarantee a good response even in presence of lots and lots of connections. So I won’t talk about them
This article (obviously!) will cover the second choice: you get an (not so) old machine, you install Debian on it and then you set up your blog there.

What you need:

A few people have asked for an updated version of my Securing WordPress Admin Access With SSL guide. So here is an updated version for WordPress 2!

The situation has not changed much since WordPress 1.5: WordPress 2.0 still does not support HTTPS access to the admin area when the rest of the blog is served via normal HTTP and I still do not like logging in to my server over unencrypted connections, especially not when using public WLANs. Getting around this WordPress limitation requires quite a few steps:

UPDATE: The info in this post is deprecated. See the new post about eAccelerator instead.

I installed Turck MMCache PHP accelerator and I got a big improvement.

ApacheBench reported 4.52 pages per second before and 12.47 pages after installation (a Wordpress 1.5.2 page on a 1.2Ghz PIII). That a 275% increase in performance, with currently no observed problems. I tested this with both Apache2 and lighttpd, and got a similar boost with both.

January 22nd, 2006: There’s an updated version of this guide for WordPress 2 now: Securing WordPress 2 Admin Access With SSL

As one can guess from the look of this site, I’m using WordPress as my blog engine. At this time WordPress does not support HTTPS access to the admin area when the rest of the blog is served via normal HTTP. This is a bit unfortunate. I do not like logging in to my server over unencrypted connections, especially not when using public WLANs. Getting around this WordPress limitation requires quite a few steps: