When I migrated my website from my old hosting account over to my Virtual Private Server yesterday, I soon realised I had overlooked something that, if left unchanged, would end up annoying me quire a bit – directory listings.

My VPS only has 128MB guaranteed RAM, and that means it’s running lighttpd instead of the altogether meatier Apache.  This doesn’t bother me in the slightest – if anything, I prefer lighttpd anyway.  I’ve learned how to use it over the past few months and I find it fast, easily-configured, and definitely ‘light’!  One of the sacrifices you make for this lightness, however, is that the directory listings aren’t anywhere near as fancy as Apache’s.  There are no filetype icons, and no option for sorting the file list by date/size/type.

This led me to look for another way of generating directory listings for my stuff subdomain, which probably gets more use than the main site because it’s where I plonk all the random things that I need to share, but don’t deserve their own page on the site.  Finding Evan Fosmark’s Enhanced Lighttpd directory generator saved me from having to use my meagre PHP knowledge to write my own script, but it only worked for the root folder that the index.php was placed in.  I wanted it to work, or at least appear to work, for the subfolders too!  This is where I remembered mod_rewrite:

1. Stick my modified index.php into your root folder and remove the .txt extension
2. Add the following to lighttpd.conf (or make your own config file, I saved mine in with the rest of my subdomain configs):

   $HTTP["host"] =~ "stuff\.jontysewell\.net" {

             url.rewrite = ( "^/(?!(.+\.\w*)).*$" => "/index.php?q=$0" )

   }

   Obviously, replace the host line as required.  This regex will make sure that any directories are sent to the generator to have nice indexes made, while files aren’t redirected and are downloaded normally.

3. Get the CSS file I use from here, and edit the $css_file variable at the top of index.php to reference wherever you put it.
4. To get fancy pants filetype icons like I have, download whatever icon set you like (I’m using Tango icons) and save the relevant files into an .icons folder in the same folder as your CSS.  (thanks to Jace for this bit of script)

And that’s about it, I think!  If you found that hard to follow, bear in mind it’s the first time I’ve written a guide for this sort of thing, and feel free to ask for help if you need it.  I can’t guarantee I’ll reply within any reasonable timeframe, but it’s worth trying!

If I ever get some more time I’d like to modify the script further so that I can put one copy of it in a central place, and use lighttpd rules to give fancy listings to any number of subdomains.

I just need to figure out some e-mail forwarders so that my @jontysewell.net addresses continue to work, and that should be it.  If there is anything you find that doesn't work, please send me an e-mail and I'll try to fix it – there's a lot of little things that I don't have time to test.

Nothing else much seems to have changed on the site, I'm just pleased that I can do things like _this and this now without much effort. :p

Oh, and there are new smileys, too. The old smiley plugin never really worked.

http://www.jontysewell.net/wp-content/uploads/happiness-is.pdf

I remember spending more time on the design than the actual words back then, but it made me think. Do I have a little bit all to myself? No. I made a resolution last year that I should always try and be positive, but it just gets harder and harder! One of two things happens. I’ll start enjoying something, but then think ‘hang on, I shouldn’t be doing this; I have x and y and z to do for school!’ or just plain ‘I shouldn’t be doing this anyway’, and then it’s gone. That, or every time I start enjoying myself at something, it ends!

For what it’s worth, I don’t hate going to school or doing school work. I just resent the fact that all the people who talk to me about school concentrate on academic achievement as being the sole most important thing. I know they don’t think that, but it’s hard to convey because it’s just the way the world works nowadays. So I’ve decided that as well as trying to concentrate on pure academic achievement to get me to university, I’m also going to concentrate on getting out of the house, and showing everyone that they can just trust me.

The smileys box is still broken.
I’m still using the plain-text editor. (otherwise I’d probably do this in a nice list)
I have actually done all my homework, which doesn’t usually happen. Some of the physics was too confusing, though.
I tried to set up a domain in a Server 2003 VM, then gave up while trying to configure the DNS, then tried to set one up in Samba in an Archlinux VM, then gave up on that as well as I realised I couldn’t really be bothered.
Stargate Universe and FlashForward are both still awesome. Completely forgot about BSG: The Plan, but it turns out it’s fairly rubbish anyway.
Gave up on Snow Leopard for now, I’d probably need a new hard disk anyway (GUID nonsense)

Finished the church website! Well, finished copying pages over from the old one. Some of the pages are a bit short, and some are new – but I’ve got a meeting on Friday to discuss all that.
Rolled some nice DVDs off the production line, although currently there are more in the bin than at church. The first one didn’t burn properly, the second one didn’t play, the third had a horrible broken menu and the fourth one was one second out of sync everywhere. It’s all OK now though. *glares at PowerDirector*

Still need to burn those CDs. I’ll find out how many I need to do tomorrow. I’m helping run a whole Scout meeting in two weeks! Scary scary, I’ll need all the help I can get (although there are three other leaders who have helped decide what to do).

I think the last.fm flash gadget thing displays last week’s charts, not this weeks. Le smeel.

I woke up in the middle of the night on Saturday with what I think can be classified as a ‘stonking’ headache, and I couldn’t get back to sleep for the rest of the night, which means I felt worn out on Sunday. By Sunday afternoon, however, the headache had gone, I just had a sore throat instead. Then this morning, I had no headache or sore throat, but a blocked nose. Now I’ve just come in from Scouts and I feel completely fine (albiet a little tired out, but that’s just Scouts for you) but I seem to have lost my voice.

Oh well, I guess having one flu symptom per day is better than having them all at once. But what will it be tomorrow? Time will tell.