Category: Daily Life

I’ve had 3 people ask if I could support Magento, the open source e-commerce application that is the current rage. It is good for midsized businesses. According to today’s reading, small sized operations are better off with a different application as the complexity of customizations and updates on Magento are more costly than a small operation should consider. I can attest that Magento is a pain to configure. What seemed like should have been a quick infusion of data into a database and a simple installation process including a config file or two and this thing should be running. No, never that simple. I allotted two hours today to install and evaluate Magento. Instead, I reached the end of the day with my head throbbing; eyes tired, red and watery; and nerves on edge resulting in an undeserved burst of anger on Noah. I’ve read dozens of tech articles, forums, and blogs, and tried installing Magento on my dev server as well as my shared hosting server. Both simply return a "500 Internal Server Error." I have not exhausted my efforts and still feel I need to know Magento. I will get it installed!

Update: I ran the Magento server check script and found my hosted server at 1and1 meets the requirements for Magento and my development server is lacking one component. Coincidentally, the magento-check.php file produced a 500 Internal Server Error on both the dev server and the hosted server until I renamed the .htaccess to something else. It would appear there is a problem in the .htaccess. This should be easy to troubleshoot now.
Update 2: My error logs indicate "DirectoryIndex not allowed here" The Magento forums suggest altering httpd.conf to have "AllowOverride All"
Update 3: This barebones guide to installing Magento at 1and1 helped.
Update 4: Success! I now have a demo installation of Magento running. This will lead to many good things.

I read something today which almost prompted me to try to delete my online identity. I guess one would call that virtual suicide.

Wait a minute! What’s this under my feet? A sandbar! In the middle of the ocean! Okay, yes, the tide is rising. Quickly. But for the moment, however brief, my head is above the water without me having to kick my legs in a frantic panic.

Have you ever been building up to make that leap? You know, the leap of faith. The one where you commit your whole self even though you aren’t sure you should but you do anyway and you are ready to put your all into it. And all the while you are gearing up to make the jump, someone else runs past you and just does it. It’s kinda like that. But that’s okay.

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Ambivalent. I am tired. Instead of picking one of the sticky notes from my monitor and working on its task, I can only cycle through the top 3 and think about how each is more important than the other while none get done. My mind also keeps thinking about Commercialmas being 22 days away. It can become Christmas again once I know I will have happy children on the 25th. I think I need to step away from the computer and collect my thoughts.

I really dislike starting the day behind the eight ball. I’ll be on DND until I get a couple of things off my plate.

I want my tombstone to read: "He spent his entire life looking for something."