Words every developer dreams of uttering as often as possible.
So I'll kick off my first ever blog entry with the perils of getting dasBlog to run at GoDaddy.com. Here's the short of it:
'Everyday I feel as if something is missing in my life; love? money? a fast car? nope..none of that. I come to the realization that my inner soul can no longer take the absence of my very own BLOG. I must have it...NOW!
Perfect timing for my Calgary .Net User Group president Daniel to detail me his love affair with dasBlog and what a cake walk it is to set it up at the 'best' hosting service of them all...yes...the infamous 'Go Daddy'.
DAY 1
20:30 PM - Call made..deals done...$75/year...ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server, tons of space and I'm the proud owner of sharymudassir.com.
21:00 PM - Download dasBlog 1.9, fire up a new VM using VMWare Workstation running Windows Server 2003 SP1, and the configuration begins.
22:00 PM - Girlfriend's starting to give the evil eye...will I spend the entire evening at the computer once again?
22:30 PM - Honey, 15 more minutes plz....
22:42 PM - Success, configured to my initial liking, let's upload! Fire up FileZilla.
22:55 PM - The famous words are uttered: "This should work" but maybe I missed something.
23:15 PM - Another version of the above quoted phrase is uttered which shall remain out of this blog.
23:45 PM - Half an hour with GoDaddy multi-tier support ranging from SuperIdiot to The Incredible Moron, and I'm no where better. By this time GF is thoroughly unimpressed.
00:00 AM - I find out that dasBlog requires FullTrust and GoDaddy doesn't buy my request for granting escalated privileges for a measly blog.
Now it is at times like these that a developer must look deep within and ask himself the most important question of all, "Do I have the courage to continue or should I abandon the task at hand and blame it on the first reason that comes to mind". And before I can figure out an answer I must go to bed and make up with a very annoyed GF.
DAY 2
Read some more posts and realize that dasBlog may have issues with ASP.NET 2.0 even if properly configured. Decide to give it a try and also drop the entire directory structure under a BLOG virtual directory instead of the root. PRESTO...it works. Persistence pays off.