Geek defeat
June 5th, 2006
Over the years I’ve taken a quiet satisfaction in my ability to figure out some of the backend stuff on my websites. I thought I’d moved from geek wannabe to at least geek manqué.
But I have to admit defeat. I’m working on a project now that uses the wonderful CivicSpace open source community platform. But to run the aggregator within the site, I need to set up a crontab on our server. So Dreamhost, our ISP, helpfully pointed me to an article on SSH and crontab. But I defy any mere mortal to understand the first thing about using PuTTY. I’m totally at sea here.
Why can’t there be a helpful radio button on the Dreamhost panel (at every other turn over the last few years, Dreamhost has been a great champion of simplification)? Or is that the kind of dumb remark that only a hopeless newbie would make?
June 6th, 2006 at 10:15 am
[...] Well, maybe I can climb back up the marginally geekish ranks. With plenty of hand-holding from DreamHost and Zack Rosen of Civicspace Labs, I set up my crontab. And it works. But I think I’ll steer clear of Unix commands in future. [...]