The other project that has me all a-twitter began as the germ of an idea when I discovered that my favorite guitar forum might be lapsing into disuse. It’s a long story I won’t go into now, but this site has a “sister” site and the idea is to just have everyone move into one. The problem I (and some others) have, is that I don’t like<\/em> the sister site!<\/p>\n So I got the idea of seeing how difficult it might be to create an alternate forum. I already have a domain and a site (this one), and checking with my ISP, found that I had plenty of storage and bandwidth, and that I could run a forum — perhaps as a subdomain to this (but more on that later. Maybe.).<\/p>\n I began researching forum software. There’s a lot of it available, both commercial and free. Side note: I believe forums are one of the oldest concepts enabled by the Internet. We used to have “bulletin board systems” (BBS) before the Internet. A forum is just a newer form of BBS. Since I participate in a number of forums (fora?) I started looking into what software they were using. A lot of cream rose to the top in short order. Here are some that I found.<\/p>\n I looked at some others, but these were the standouts.\u00a0 There are plenty of review sites, and I found this one<\/a> lists all of the above, with comments.\u00a0 Wikipedia<\/a> has a table comparing forum software capabilities. Not wanting to shell out dollars for a proof-of-concept, I decided to see what some of the free packages offer.\u00a0 I downloaded DIscourse and installed it on my Linux server, and then I fetched phpBB and installed it on my Mac.\u00a0 Yes, that’s right, I put a software forum on my Mac!<\/p>\n At first, I was hesitant to install on my Mac, because with all the needed components, I thought it might chew up too much disk space.\u00a0 Wow, was I mistaken!<\/p>\n Based on php<\/a>, the scripting language designed for the web, it wasn’t necessary to install, because Macs already ship with it.\u00a0 I just made sure it was up to date.\u00a0 Years ago I found a free web server alternative to Apache<\/a> (which is bundled with every Mac, but I find difficult to set up) called Abyss Web Server from a company called Aprelium<\/a>.\u00a0 I’ve used in for years, and it’s solid and feature-filled.\u00a0 All I needed was a database, so I downloaded SQLite3<\/a> and created an empty database.\u00a0 The install was a snap, and I began to build a forum.\u00a0 I downloaded and installed a theme I liked, a language pack for American English (British English is the default) and even poked a hole through my router so that a couple of people I invited could look at it.<\/p>\n Well, that was a fun couple of days.\u00a0 Now to my ISP…<\/p>\n In conversing with one of their staff (maybe the only one — she’s been with the company since before I became a customer — and that was 25 years ago!) she informed me I could install phpBB without a problem, and that she created a sub-domain so that I could add the forum without clobbering this site.\u00a0 It’s done.\u00a0 Now, my next step is to take what I’ve learned locally and start thinking globally!<\/p>\n YES!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past year has been almost a daily re-hash of wake, coffee, work, exercise, eat and sleep. Rinse and repeat. So, it’s with a bit of excitement that I find myself all of a sudden involved with several new projects … Continue reading \n
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