You can read why you should always use a source control system like Trac/Subversion in Ronald Widha’s post.

For a cheap and easy to set up hosted Trac solution, all you need is a DreamHost hosting plan. It is extremely cheap (I have a discount code for you). You also get some other notable benefits including:

•    Virtually unlimited bandwidth
•    Virtually unlimited disk space
•    Links easily to Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network so you can have your content mirrored at servers all around the world (blog example)
•    Free Google Adsense credit (usually $50)
•    Option to have a virtualised server with root access, with memory configurable to the megabyte instantly, and Railscrapetc
•    97-day refund guarantee
•    One free domain name registration
•    Option to host your email and documents with Gmail and Google Docs for free (this is usually chargeable for businesses)

I’ve hosted my personal sites and projects with DreamHost for years, and found them to be reliable. There have been some downtimes here and there but nothing serious. For the price I pay and the amount of resources I use (I use over 1TB of bandwidth a month) it is a fantastic deal. Ed Eliot agrees. I have also found the support to be very friendly and generally quick, and there is an option to have telephone contact (often unavailable with cheaper web hosts).

I also designed an application using DreamHost’s API and won their competition (prize money $$$ ).

You can get $10 off an already cheap hosting plan using the code JONH10. You’ll also get one free domain name registration. There is a 97-day refund period so you don’t risk anything giving it a go. Click here to sign up.

In summary, the cheapest DreamHost account will give you a one-click Trac and Subversion hosted solution.

And yes, I do get a reward if you sign up

I have diverted old URL links including the RSS feeds using Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Here is an example of the code I used, placed in an htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog_rss.php$ /articles/feed/ [R=301,L]

This code rewrites any requests to blog_rss.php to /articles/feed so that any requests from the old feed are now redirected with a HTTP 301 response header to the new feed. The ‘L’ indicates that this is the last change the RewriteRule should make, effectively ignoring any rules that may come after this.

RFC2616 from W3 specifies HTTP 301 as ‘Moved Permanently.’ Using this code should help search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo to update their indexes. I’ve done my part by following the published standards.

WordPress also links nicely to Microsoft Word 2007, so I can take advantage of its grammar and spelling checkers, and the useful feature of holding down Alt and clicking on a word to access research tools such as dictionaries and a thesaurus. Skatter Tech’s article describes how to connect Word 2007’s Blog feature to WordPress.

I’d like to see Wordpress supporting SQLite, but it looks like this isn’t on the cards for some time.

With the burden of making my own blogging software removed, I intend to be posting more interesting articles in the future. I hope to be posting on more varied subjects than just web technology. If there is anything you’d like to hear about, please leave a comment. You’ll also get a funny avatar monster made for you if you comment