If you missed my first post, well… I would say go read it, but I don’t actually recommend that you read anything that I post. If you caught it, then you know that this is a blog. You know that it’s here. And you know that it’s probably stupid. The thing about blogs though, no matter how stupid, is that they don’t just pop up wherever, whenever they feel like it. Somebody has to put in the time to actually assemble one. And guess what? This blog is no different. What is very different about this blog though is the way in which it was assembled, and the awesome technologies which came together to make it happen.

Now if anyone who I actually know is reading this blog, I promise you their eyes glazed over the moment I splattered the words ‘awesome technologies’ on the screen. That’s because when I start talking about ‘awesome technology’ is usually about the point when I start to drone on about boring nerd crap that they don’t understand, and don’t care about. Fear not, my less-than-techie crowd. What we all need to remember is that the core of this series is just a look at building a blog, something anyone can take something away from. While I will be very much be getting into the gory details of the Domain Name System, webserver functionality, command line programs, and a whole host of other topics that enthusiasts clamor for, the wizadry and the basics will be nicely separated into their own sections, or probably even separate posts entirely. The goal of this series is for you, my beloved reader, to delve as shallow or as deeply into this topic as you feel comfortable delving. Or, if you’re a geek, to be able to easily skip over the basics that you’ve already read a hundred times. Or, at least that’s the stated goal. The unstated goal is to show off how awesome of a nerd I am, and increase my street cred, obviously.

With all that being said, off we embark, on our blog building adventure! The first thing to do on this adventure is identify what exactly is needed to launch a blog. Luckily, I already have that answer for you ;) Every blog that wants to be viewable by human beings is going to need, in no particular order, the following:

• A Domain name
• A Platform
• A Host

Now at this point, if you’re a human, you may be wondering, “What the hell are all of those things?” Well, feeble human, we will cover all of that for you and more in the upcoming series. If you’re a geek, you’re probably looking at this list thinking, “I already knew all of that… so what?” Well, sun-starved geek, I got you covered too. As part of this series, I’ll be covering my implementation of each of those components in the building of this blog, and you will praise them, and say cool things about them.

Stay tuned folks.

As a junior system administrator working in the support department of a web hosting company (I won’t say which one, in the interest of reserving the right to safely poke fun at them in future posts), I hear a lot of complaints. In fact, I hear them every single day, in merciless droves. I’ll even go so far as to say the only way I can get through a work day without being assaulted by a persistent inundation of petty grievances is if I shutdown my workstation, unplug my office phone, and spend the rest of the day running through the data center, screaming too loudly to hear the sound of my bosses telling me to plug it all back in (and shortly thereafter firing me). In other words, the only way to avoid the onslaught of needless grumbles is to just not go to work. The moral of this anecdote though is not that I hate my job (I actually don’t, if you can believe that). It’s that I have heard quite a diversity of beefs that people have with this world, and more specifically, with the internet that we all share in this world. Even with this exceptional level of diversity under my belt, I can still say with a high degree of confidence that there is at least one complaint in this world which I have never had the opportunity to pretend to listen to. Indeed, Not once, in any of my many adventures with the scores of testy clients I handle on a daily basis, have I ever heard a single one of them lament to me, “James, there are not enough blogs on today’s internet!”. Yet here I am. Amongst all of the complaints about broken or inadequate things, with which I am so intimately familiar, I have, for some incomprehensible reason, set out to make a contribution to the internet in the one capacity which no one believes to be suffering from an incapacity problem. YASB.

So if you’ve found this stupid blog, then I think it safe to assume you’re also asking yourself, “Why the hell would I want to read this stupid blog?” The answer is, you probably don’t. But you’re bored, and you need to kill time while you’re (at work)/(procrastinating on your homework)/(taking a break from being awesome). So I counter to you sir (Ok, that was horribly sexist. You may very well be a ma’am), why the hell not read this stupid blog? If you ever wanted to learn a thing or two about the internet, programming, or alternative operating systems (Ok, so maybe I embellished a bit… really just Linux), and you can decode the pseudo-language that is most of my technical babbling, then you might have actually come to the right place. Or, if you want to troll some poor welp on the internet (that’s me!) who can barely piece together a sentence in proper English or communicate with any semblance of clarity, you might just read my posts and leave disparaging comments about how I’m living, breathing proof of the ineptitude of the American education system. I think between those two options, we can all agree there’s something here for everyone.

Speaking of things we can all agree on, I think we can all agree that the only thing more boring than reading yet another stupid blog post is reading a stupid blog post about what the stupid blog is about. So I’ll let this stupid blog describe itself to you through the delivery of its content, and lay this stupid post to rest. Welcome to the LottSpot.