- Previous versions of this site
- How I make and manage the content on this site
- How the site is hosted
- Other tools I use
- Custom settings to make Joomla and NearlyFreeSpeech work together
PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THIS SITE
I started mikesjeep.com in the late 1990's writing about projects for my 1979 CJ7 (yes, I still have that CJ7). It is hosted at Angelfire (hello 90's!) and it's still accessable here. Warning, it's ugly and probably has pop-ups and ads that might break the site. I put the site and the Jeep on hiatus in 2003 when my wife gave birth to twins. Around February of 2016 when I decided I was going to buy a new Jeep Wrangler I decided to reboot the mikesjeep.com website too. At that point I moved the hosting to nearlyfreespeech.net and wrote all new code by hand. However I'm no HTML wizard so my web pages were all static pages. As traffic increased I knew I wanted a more robust blog type layout to offer things like search and the ability to link to individual blog posts, so I move all the content to Joomla in December 2017. In 2018 I moved the hosting to Rochen.
AUTHORING
This site is built using the open source Joomla content management system. It is fantastic, I wish I had discovered it earlier. Joomla is a database driven content management system that is very simple to use, yet very robust and powerful. There is a bit of a learning curve but just watch their excellent tutorial videos and you'll be up and running in just an hour or two.
These are some extensions and templates I use with Joomla to add functionality:
- The JCE editor
- The ostrainingbreeze template
- The Akeeba Backup extension.
HOSTING
This site is hosted at Rochen. They cater to Joomla (and other CMS's) so getting up and running is a snap. Although I don't think anybody is as cheap as my previous hosting company NearlyFreeSpeech.net, Rochen is priced very competetively, especially if you need email.
This site was hosted at nearlyfreespeech.net. It's been rock-solid performance wise, and I don't think there is anything cheaper out there. I can't recommend NFS highly enough! If you have enough technical knowledge to use it (which is just the basics) you should already be hosting your sites on NFS.
TOOLS
I use Apple Mac computers for everything. There was a time when I had to defend my choice to use a Mac but now-a-days almost everybody seems to have seen the light and moved to Mac.
For writing code or plain text files I use TextWrangler from Bare Bones software, the makers of the excellent BBEdit.
For FTP I use Forklift.
For SSH I use Terminal
CUSTOM SETTINGS
For those who want to run the same setup I have utilising Joomla and nearlyfreespeech.net there are some things you'll need to know to get it to work. I wrote an article about it here. However maintaining a Joomla site on NFS is a struggle so be prepared to troubleshoot upgrade issues. I eventually decided to move to Rochen because of the work involved in keeping a Joomla site running on NFS.