First, I would like to thank Brett Hoerner for providing the initial details for this setup on my old Slicehost server. Without his previous post I would be a little duck in the middle of the ocean. This walk through will cover the following setup:

• Create a New User and Disable Root Login
• Update and Install Common Packages
• Setup Postfix for Email Forwarding
• Install Basic Apache2 Configuration
• Install Basic PHP5 Libraries
• Install Basic Python Libraries
• Install & Setup Postgresql
• Create a better SSH Motd

It seems every time I setup a new machine I hit the same snag installing psycopg2 into a virtualenv via pip. It's not well documented online. After a bunch of failed searching with my Google foo I found a solution. In short, you can get around the issues using build-dep. Thanks Eliot!

There is no question that backups are important. Backups should always be offsite, and no matter how many backups you are creating, you're always one too short. For this blog, as simple as it is, I have many backup mechanisms in place. The last of which is covered in this blog post.

• Bitbucket backups my code base keeping copies in several different physical locations.
• For $5/mo Slicehost will keep 3 backup of my linux setup on their servers.
• Nightly snapshots of Postgres database stored on Dropbox.

In the past, I have gone great lengths to avoid including large amounts of Javascript on any webpages I built. In recent years, this has slowly shifted to a point where I am comfortable allowing my visitor's web browser handle some of the heavy lifting. I believe most of this credit should goto W3C and the standards they strongly push. Even IE has been getting better in the last year or two. I shouldn't even need to mention Chrome, anyone who has used that browser recently knows Chrome is really proving that Javascript isn't something to be overlooked.