Ionrock Dot Org

I keep running back to this issue in my free time and I am pretty sick of it. But, before I get too ahead of myself, I should mention I really enjoy programming. I enjoy it so much that at times I just don't get enough of my programming fix at work. The resolution is to program at home. Recently I made a photo gallery tool for Lauren to upload funny pictures for friends. It is all very simple, but I have enjoyed working on it because it is simple and functional.

Now, I would like to do more of this kind of programming. I would like to make my own personal aggregation page that I can add things like blogs or small applications. The problem is I don't want to do this in PHP. At the moment my web host does have Rails available, but I enjoy Python more than Ruby at the moment and it doesn't make sense for me to invest more time into Rails than I already have. My web host does have Python but I think it is version 2.1, so that is out.

My only option is to change hosting companies. I would like a hosting company where I can run something like cherrypy or turbogears along side a simple php site. I have been looking at Westhost (formally python-hosting) but they have rather strict limits on the amount of long running processes you can run. I am cheap so, only the minimalist account works for me! I keep going back to dreamhost, but you have to pay up front and their python version is at 2.3. This isn't too bad considering they give you a full hard drive of space, multiple shell/ftp accounts and unlimited domain hosting.

My other option is to get a VPS -type system. This does appeal to my desire of one day understanding more about apache and general linux sys-admining. Unfortunately, my fear is that I would have to actually understand how a mail server works. That fear alone makes it a pretty unlikely solution. Along these same lines, I have thought about just running a box at home. This solution isn't too bad, but I don't currently have a box and the whole email side of things is still an issue. With that said, I don't get email for ionrock.org anyway, so going from no email to no email doesn't really bother me much. I do have a few laptops I could use for it, but honestly, that just feels lame.

So far I am leaning toward biting the bullet and just getting a webfaction or dreamhost account. I know webfaction will handle my basic needs and although limiting my development to one running process may hinder my software design a bit, it might also make for a small but challenging issue. On the other side of things, I've yet to create an actual application to run on my long running process and when comparing features between dreamhost and webfaction, dreamhost definitely wins.

With these pressing issues in mind, I have also looked into PHP frameworks, hoping I could find something helpful enough to just stay put or turn the tide to dreamhost. CakePHP was and well designed, but there was little mystery how it worked and it felt like it was written by a PHP developer (which is probably was). What I mean by this is that most data structures are kept as arrays. This is probably best of course, but it is more fun to make your own iterable objects and overload a few operators. I think I should also give Symphony a try, but I don't know when that will happen.

One thing is for sure. Things could be worse!