Gravatars have now been fixed, and appear whenever you comment on a post.

If you don’t have a gravatar yet, feel free to signup at http://gravatar.com – many sites now use them, so you’re time won’t be wasted.

But how does blandname use gravatars?

We implement them using a hacked-up version of some third-party code, but the display ends up being roughly the same as everywhere else – we just create a call to gravatar(); where we want to have gravatars displayed. Sounds easy huh?

All of these virtual appliances have been tested with ESX server, and may have issues elsewhere.

For appliances that needed it, I used VMware Converter, the version that ships with Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 (VI3.5).

Please note that both ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 are available as trials from VMware currently, and I would highly recommend trying them out as it really is night and day compared to VMware Workstation, Server and Player.

That said, for the most part you’ll be fine working with VMware Server 2.0 – it’s free and has a special version of VMware Infrastructure Client to boot.

The list:

1. Astaro Security Gateway – This is a must in any build for me. I use this to bridge between my LAN/WAN and the virtual networks that I create. There is a 10-device, 1000 connection “home user” license available from My Astaro that should be more than sufficient to get you up and running with a clean, secure virtual network.
2. Ubuntu 7.10 JeOS Mini-image – this image weighs in at only 70MB or so, expands to roughly 200MB, has apt-get installed, and is a perfect candidate for building virtual appliances with. VMware tools is installed, so you don’t need to worry about things like date and time sync.
3. OpenBSD 4.2 – The OpenBSD image is great for getting started in the OpenBSD world: learning the shell, commands, networking, and in my case, firewalling. The verison I use comes from Chrysaor.info, but feel free to use your own.
4. OpenSuSE 10.3 – I can’t live without this virtual appliance – I use it for just about everything, and is the first appliance installed in any environment. Note that it is a bit bloated, containing USB, sound and other components typically not needed in a virtual environment. On the other hand, since it’s tried and tested on my end, it’s a lifer.
5. Trac – I use Trac as a wiki and VM staging log. I consider all VMs, hosts and Virtual Center as software projects, and monitor changes closely. If ever I need to pull up quick info about a virtual machine, host, network, router or firewall, it’s all in Trac.
6. WordPress – I use my WordPress virtual machine to stage different versions of blandname, to test updates, upgrades, and plugins. This also allows me to change themes, move Adsense blocks around, and generally to play without fear of losing revenue or breaking something.
7. MySQL / PHPMyAdmin – This is not a requirement for any of the virtual machines / appliances mentioned above, but I prefer to keep it separate in order to manage multiple databases with one interface without the need to login to multiple IP addresses.
8. OpenFiler – Openfiler is an interesting virtual machine in that it provides storage to other virtual machines. This allows you to have shares that multiple virtual appliances can access, be it SMB, NFS, FTP or iSCSI. Note that using iSCSI in a VM may seem redundant, but it’s a great way to get your feet wet with iSCSI without the need for a separate box. I use OpenFiler as a general purpose storage device, and can’t see this changing anytime soon, though FreeNAS may be a good alternative to those interested in the BSD-type appliances.
9. Joomla – I’ve been considering moving most of my websites to Joomla based mainly on the CMS/approval workflow that WordPress has, but implements poorly. You could probably use this in place of the Trac server as well if you are just managing info, but since I’m still testing, these are kept separately for now.
10. NagiOS – NagiOS provides a centralized monitoring solution for all of the virtual appliances, as well as any hardware device you have that uses SNMP. I use NagiOS to monitor print queues, bandwidth, uptime and my ESX / Virtual Center servers as well!
11. Nostalgia – That’s right, this list of 10 goes to 11! Nostalgia is included as the first VM appliance download for VI3, and I must say, I’m hooked on 3D Tetris from California Dreams, just as badly as I was when I originally played it on my Amiga 500.

That rounds up the list. You’ll note that most of the appliances listed have to do with *nix and web development. Also left out is the fact that Virtual Center is running on a hardware box, and not a virtual machine, like others have done. This argument could go on forever, but I like the agility of having VC2.5 as a separate entity.

Any additions?

• vTiger CRM Virtual Machine
• RDP Manager for your Windows System Tray
• HOWTO TrixBox – VoIP Virtual Machine
• Online Virtual Machine Builder
• Microsoft Distributes Demo Software via VHD
• FREE Terminal Server Monitoring Tool
• VMware Workstation 6 Feature List
• Multi monitor support for RDP 6
• Add Reflections to bbPress Images
• Google PageRank and Alexa in Your Firefox 2
• Display Digg in WordPress – Digg Dugg Plugin
• Google Analytics Plugn for bbPress

As a lazy developer and software-lover, my only choice is to implement ALL of the solutions, one at a time.

So that’s how we got here with our second real announcement, after the Digg plugin for Pandion (thanks to 43things for reminding me once weekly that I needed to start an open-source project).

I’ve opened a forum for all to use – you can feel free to post tech support questions, links you have found, or just general chit-chat if need be. I’ve set up a pretty good spam filtering system, but we’ll see how it works. I honestly have a hard time believing anything could work as well as Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma 2 plugin for WordPress.

So head on over to the blandname forum and check it out!

I’ve set up BBPress there, and to be honest it was a cinch. I’ll post a how to later, but it’s not so involved. I was able to get modrewrite going right away – which in my opinion is an absolute necessity for proper SEO. I will be attempting to integrate the themes and users via MySQL shortly, so if you’ve registered with blandname, you’ll have access to the forums as well.

You’ve also probably gathered that blandname is currently running WordPress. Dreamhost has had a one-click install for WordPress 2 for a while now, and since it was handy at the time, we went for it.

But things change, and one-click installs often are not enough to satisfy most webmasters, which is how we got where we are today. Since my goal with blandname is to create another multiuser blog similar to what has already been running for years at yottabite, but instead of having one big weblog, we’d like to have multiple subdomains like string.blandname.com, which WordPress MU allows you to accomplish, automatically.

Unfortunately DreamHost doesn’t support WordPress MU‘s subdomains by default yet (you can always send them an email), but we can still get away with subfolders, which is more than good enough for a test.

This guide will require familiarity with DreamHost’s control panel, as well as common Bash shell commands as we will be using SSH.

The first step is to make a test domain for you WordPress MU install. In my case, I navigated to the “Domains” section of the left-hand menu, then to the “Manage Domains” section of the DreamHost panel, and created the new subdomain test.blandname.com. You’ll want to make sure to select PHP5, and enable extra security. This typically takes about 10 minutes to complete, but we still have the database to add, so let’s get to that at the same time.

In the “goodies” section of the DreamHost control panel, select “Manage MySQL”. The default view is to set up a new MySQL database, which is what we’re going to do. Create a unique database name, the subdomain you would like it to use, as well as the data base username and password. Make sure to keep note of all of these settings as we will need them when installing WPMU.

DreamHost will have by now created a folder in your SSH root that will allow you to place files there and start some of the work while we wait for the subdomain to be created and propagate. Login to your server using SSH (you’ll need to use either your DreamHost hostname here or another web address for now – you can use the WordPress Mu domain later). Now we’ll navigate to the new subdirectory that was created when we setup the new subdomain by typing: cd test.blandname.com Change the folder name to whatever is pertinent in this case.

Now that we’re in the correct folder, we’ll grab the latest using the always-handy WGET. Here’s the code:

wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

gunzip latest.tar.gz

tar -xvf latest.tar

cd wordpressmu-1.0 (this will probably change, ls -al will tell you the dirname)

cp -rf * /home/YOURUSERNAME/test.yourdomain.com/

cd ..

rm -rf wordpressmu-1.0/

Now we’ve got a clean directory structure in the root of our test domain, and we’re set to go ahead with the WordPress MU installation.

By now the subdomain has probably propagated because DreamHost is getting faster and faster, so using your web browser, navigate to test.yourdomain.com

Next you’ll want to retrieve the soiled napkin, SubEthaEdit file or whatever else it was that you used to jot down the database settings, and plop them in here. They are very straightforward, and this is typically the most problematic so check them twice but have no fear: if you mess up WP MU will tell you, and you can retrieve the settings from the “Manage MySQL” section in the DreamHost web control panel.

The rest is quite simple: you’ll be met with a typical WordPress installation page, but instead it’s for WorPress MU. The first question that needs to be asked is whether or not WordPress MU users will be using subdomains or subfolders of the root WPMU installation. As previously stated, DreamHost currently does not support subdomains by default (I’ve put in a request, here’s hoping), so we’ll select subfolders here. WP MU will have already placed the domain name you will be using in the yellow textfield, but if you had decided to use subfolders instead of the webroot, you’ll want to specify that here as this will affect all links as well as your RSS feeds.

Lastly, we’ll want to name our multi-user WordPress MU blog, and specify the email address that you will use for things like spam reports, and replies to your comments on the parent blog.

Click on that small “submit” button, and let’s see what happens!

Hopefully on the next screen you’ll see this message:

Creating Database Config File: DONE
Congrats! Your WPMU site has been set up and you have been sent details of your login and password in an email.

Click on the link provided, and get with customization, as we’re all done.

Some quick Mephisto features:

• Easy Typo and Textpattern Blog Conversion
• Easy Asset Management
• Slick GUI
• Article Tagging, Filtering, and Improvements