It's not that easyCGI has great email hosting. their webmail is workable at best (better, since the last upgrade). they only provide POP3, not IMAP email. The reason i wanted to switch back? BlueHost doesn't provide a catchall address. Apparently doing so would cripple their servers, because your email server is the same as your web server. and 'all that spam' would bring the server to its knees. i've posted about this in their forums, but apparently all that does is bring out the idiot fanboys saying 'your spam is everyone's problem'. no, bluehost's poorly configured servers are everyone's problem.

Having had a catchall email for archgfx.net for 4 years on 2 webhosts, this seems bizarre to me. there's no reason that one email couldn't receive more spam than all the uncreated addresses put together. This is exactly how my email is set up. i have specific junk addresses: crappy, crapmail, webmaster, sales, etc. They come from using throwaway email addresses to sign up for things, and from standard addresses that bots think will reach the site owner. They all route to a yahoo inbox that i can dumpster dive for registration emails if the need arises.

The rest of the email to archgfx lands in my main inbox. this includes emails to sunburntkamel, adam, afreetly, af, and other addresses that were either easier to pronounce over the phone, or that people have erroneously remembered. I can't possibly remember all of them, or attempt to generate all the possible misspellings and misrememberings of my name. so not having a catchall is a dealbreaker for me.

Back when it was first opened, i read derek's post, and signed up for gmail hosted. I found out then that i couldn't set up email aliases to non-archgfx.net addresses. at the time, that was a big enough pain for me to not bother using the service. now, having to keep two gmail windows open (one hosted, one standard) is less of an issue than losing mail that i've depended on arriving for 4 years. So i changed my MX records again, since hosted gmail beats the $3.95 a month for easyCGI.

I can't set up email aliases on hosted gmail, but i can forward email. so i have one junk box (crapmail), that forwards its contents to yahoo. the other 'big spam' addresses are aliased to that one. it works, more or less. i have to think it would be easier on google's servers for them to just let me alias to yahoo, but functionally, it's about the same. and i doubt google's servers are going to buckle under the strain.

The main reason i switched was that i wanted was to be able to move wordpress into the top level directory, from /blog/. so i figured i'd try and do it all in one fell swoop. what's more fun than trying to do something "mission critical" in a language you've just learned? so here's what i added to my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/index.php/(.*) /blog/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/wp-content/(.*) /wp-content/$1
</IfModule>

the first line is for old URL's. the second line is for anything i uploaded and referenced in a post (especially images). so far both seem to be working. (i found the RedirectMatch example on this page). And, since you're reading this, the CNAME record seems to have been set up, although i had to file a support ticket for that.

UPDATE: i forgot that i'd also added a prefix to my permalink structure (/blog/) so my redirects were all failing. should be fixed now (code updated)

The Links List is now preserved for posterity in the new plugin directory. It's a lot simpler than i imagined, although it seems that the old plugin site doesn't see it as a new plugin (not that i wanted it to), so i imagine that frontend is going to be deprecated pretty quickly (or maybe that's just wishful thinking).

I'm still hoping this doesn't mean there will be a similar new directory for themes, since

• the licensing needs are substantially different
• the potential for abuse is higher (people uploading themes they don't have the rights to)

It wouldn't be without benefit, but i don't see it having the same feeling that the plugin directory does. And, as I've said before, themes will find their own repositories and homepages, regardless of the presence of an official repository. whether it's designers being fussy, or the nature of skins and themes being somewhat "other" is up for debate, but it's unlikely that wordpress will ever find that one home for wordpress themes.

• Putty (download)
• PuttyGen (same as above)
• WinSCP (download)

Putty and PuttyGen are just executable programs, they don't install. After you've installed winSCP and rebooted, go to your SF.net Admin Menu and choose Shell/DB/web. On this page, they list the location of your web files. The important one is Path to htdocs directory: (/home/groups/P/PR/PROJECTNAME/htdocs). That's just reference right now.

PHPMyAdmin

First set up our MySQL database. Halfway down the page, there's a link to "Manage Project Databases", which takes you to a page where you will set your passwords. I use the same password for all 3. not the most secure, theoretically, but i can't think why i would be sharing any of the passwords with anyone. After you set your password, use the link on that page to log into PHPMyAdmin with your admin account. first thing you'll do is create a database:

i just put wp or wordpress on the end of it, but you should leave the project number as a prefix.

PuttyGen

To log in to your site, you need to set up an SSH key pair. Open up PuttyGen.exe. we're going to follow these instructions. When you click 'generate key', you'll see this:

so be ready to shake your tail feathers pointer finger, it only takes a few seconds. Once it's generated (i didn't bother entering a passphrase, but you might want to) edit the 'Key comment' field like so (the key automatically updates):

Copy everything in the Public Key field, and click over to your Account maintenance page. Near the bottom, click the [Edit SSH Keys for Shell/CVS] link. Paste your key into that field. Make sure you click the "Save Private Key" button, and then close PuttyGen.

WinSCP

Open winSCP. on the configuration screen, click New:

the private key file is the one you saved from PuttyGen a minute ago. You'll also want to go to the directory page, and set the remote directory to your htdocs directory. Save your settings, and click Login. winSCP will warn you about the accepting the key fingerprint, click yes.

You can either unzip wordpress locally, and upload the whole thing, which takes a while, or you can just upload the *.tar.gz file and unzip it on the server. Techtite just posted an explanation of this, although there are a few differences I'll explain in a minute.

Putty

When you open Putty.exe, you'll need to configure it much the same way you did winSCP:

Save your settings, and login. You'll be prompted for your username, and then you'll want to type cd /home/groups/P/PR/PROJECTNAME/htdocs. Following Ajay's instructions, the wget command doesn't work, because your shell account doesn't have access to anything that's not on SF.net. so here are the commands i used:

tar xzvf wordpress-2.1.2.tar.gz
cp -rf wordpress/* ./
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
vi wp-config.php

vi is a text editor. Once it opens, the first thing you should do, is type 'i'. That puts you into insert mode (the default is view). enter the information from the "Manage Project Databases" page, like so:

You can paste into Putty by placing the cursor where you want, and right-clicking on the window. And yes, we're changing that '99% chance you won't need to change this' line. You'll need to use the admin username and password. after you're done editting, press 'ESC' to switch back to view mode, and then ':wq' to write the file and quit.

now you're ready to run install.php! while you're setting up all your favorite options, you'll note that

• you can't set up akismet. not sure what to do about that just yet.
• you can't upload files. or add custom headers. not sure what to do about that either.
• when you edit your permalink structure, it won't save. you'll have to fire up vi to do that as well.

Adding your Theme

you can keep an up to date copy of your theme installed via SVN. Just:

cd wp-content/themes/
svn co http://PROJECTNAME.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/PROJECTNAME/trunk/ PROJECTNAME

don't forget the /trunk. since you're doing this via command line, you'll need to make sure your capitalization matches.  and that last PROJECTNAME is whatever you want to call your theme folder.

The last thing you'll need to do is add your sourceforge code.  The code is on that Shell/DB/web page, about halfway down.