ANKUR JAIN

Recently, I came across the Time.com’s list of 25 sites, We Can’t Live Without.

I read it till the end to discover the new websites, I might be unaware of. I thought so because being a software professional, I spend much of my time daily browsing Internet. Not to my surprise, I came across quite a few websites, I had not heard of. More so, may be because I don’t need the services offered by them like one that’s selling shoes and accessories. But there were some websites, I was happy to browse.

One of them is Craiglist, it’s more like Yellow Pages cum Free Advertisements that are bundled for free alongwith the Newspapers. I was surprised to see a separate section for Bangalore and that too quite an active one.

Others in the list were mainly News-Related Websites or portals like Yahoo, MSN & AOL. Though they are not exactly comparable in terms of size and content, but that’s a broad category I’m putting them into.

Drudge Report, Factcheck.org, National Public Radio and The Onion are the ones, which are mainly meant for reading news. Out of all of them, I found Drude Report quite unique. It’s like Bookmark folder in your browser, with links to almost all popular news websites and some other hyperlinks to the Breaking News of the day.

Other than them, one of the interesting website, I came across is Netflix.com It’s an online movie rental website, with more than 65,000 titles - Classics to new releases. It offers free shipping, no late fees and free trial for new customers. Ultimate treat for movie buffs. A clean interface to browse the movie titles is appealing and little background about the movies is quite informative. A rating mechanism or a link to IMDB for that particular title would have been great But I think the other website Rotten Tomatoes fills in that gap.

Last category of websites was shopping websites like Shopzilla and Zappos. Shopzilla has quite a vast variety of products from different stores, zappos offers accessories mainly like shoes, handbags and apparels. Both of them are quite okay, as you can rate them after comparing the deals offered by them.

Then, there were the giants like Amazon, Google, Yahoo etc. everyone knows, use and of course, we can’t live WITHOUT any one of them. In the end, here is a list of sites, I can’t live without - Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Blogger, Google News, ESPN, Ebay, Flickr, Apple Movie Trailers and The Internet Movie Database.

Lyceum is an extension of the popular Wordpress blogging software. While Wordpress is a single user blogging software, Lyceum is a multiple users blogging software. Under early development, read about it here

I tried installing it on my Windows XP system, running Apache 2.0.59, PHP 4.4.3 & MySQL 3.23.42 and faced quite some problems, so thought to blog about it.

Installation Steps

Download, Install and configure Apache, MySQL and PHP on your Windows Machine. Download and Installation should not be a problem. For configuration, you may follow these links:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/php4install.shtml

http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=6452

After you’ve configured all the above 3 components, download Lyceum source from here

Extract the source and place it under your DocumentRoot (<DOC_ROOT>). You should have the following directory structure.

	<DOC_ROOT>/lyceum
		+  /dev
		|  /doc
		|  /src
		|    + /bin
		|    | /config
		|    | /installation
		|    | /lib
		|    + /lyceum
		+   /tests

Before starting the installation verify the Apache configuration first. You must have mod_rewrite module enabled in your Web Server Configuration. Also in the <Directory> configuration part of your Apache configuration file, you must set the AllowOverride directive to “All”; that is, “AllowOverride All”

Now, create a database in your MySQL server for lyceum as lyceum does not create the database itself.
SQL : mysql>CREATE DATABASE lyceum;

In case you are using MySQL < 4.0.X, verify if you’ve got InnoDB & MyISAM database engines enabled in your MySQL server. If not modify schema.php (<DOC_ROOT>/lyceum/src/installation/) accordingly to remove the ENGINE directives from SQL statements.

Modify wp-config-sample.php (<DOC_ROOT>/lyceum/src/config/) to create wp-config.php with modifications to following fields:

DB_NAME : Name of the Database you’ve created in MySQL.
DB_USER : Database User Name
DB_PASSWORD : Password for the specified Database User Name.
DB_HOST : Server Name / Addresss (’localhost’ in case of local installation)
WEBROOT : Location of /lyceum/src/lyceum on the server (Directory where portal.php is placed. Note: ‘no trailing slash after the path)
MAINDOMAIN : 127.0.0.1 ( For local installation. Note: ‘localhost’ will not work)

Start the installation from your web browser using the URL : <server_address>/<webroot>/wp-admin/install.php

It should work fine. Comment if you face any issues.