Godaddy does not support telnet or SSH into its servers, so after downloading the latest Geeklog revision (a release candidate 1.4.0rc2) I had to get it on the server via FTP. FTP also allows for changing file and directory attributes as the Geeklog install instructions require.

I eventually decided to put all the directories except the public_html directory under /weblog_engine. I put the public_html directory under /weblog so that users can access my weblog as gladfelter.net/weblog. I made the weblog_engine directory invisible to any snoopers by creating a file called .htaccess in the /weblog_engine directory and putting this in the file:

This causes Apache to deny all access to this directory so that snoopers can't read my database passwords, etc. The database was a pain to configure, after creating a database using GoDaddy's configuration manager I didn't see the actual server for my database was mysql99.secureserver.net. The instructions on the GoDaddy site use mysql.secureserver.net and I didn't realize that was a suggestion. It didn't help that I didn't have a lot of confidence in the GoDaddy database, as it wasn't immediately clear to me that the database name and the user name for the database will always be the same.

After successfully configuring config.php, etc there was still a problem with submitting comments. I discovered on the geeklog site that some hosting services do not allow a database lock command. The command in question is "LOCK TABLES" and its counterpart "UNLOCK TABLES". This is to prevent race conditions, I guess, but I don't anticipate a problem with this small site, so I removed the commands as recommended in the geeklog user forums.

I've tweaked some display stuff since then. Overall, I'm really impressed with the geeklog software!