Equinox: What to do? Watch sun rise or move DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com to WordPress?

If you’ve never seen the sun rise in downtown Chicago on or near the vernal equinox (autumnal will do just as well), it’s worth scheduling a trip for. I’m from Seattle originally, so I was always impressed with how Chicago’s street grid is laid out: unlike a city with actual geography getting in the way, here everything is exactly north and south, east and west. On the equinox the sun rises in the due east and it’s spectacular, blinding light streaming straight down glass & steel canyons on Washington, Madison, Adams, Monroe. It’s nice at sunset too, but in my opinion sunrise is better, since you generally have a little more solitude. Well, fewer people, anyway.

My daughter and I were going to get up early and drive downtown, but alas: it was a cloudy day, so we’ll have to settle for sunset.

But I was up early anyway, so I decided to make good use of my time, and move the Dynamics CRM User Group (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com ) from our on-premise MOSS 2007 environment to a hosted platform running the WordPress software.  I’m still a big fan of SharePoint (for Enterprise Content Management and Collaboration you can’t beat it), but for some things WordPress is just way better.

Note: if you’ve read some of the recent articles on the Trick Bag you’ll know I’m a relatively new fan of the hosted model. After all these years of assuming I had to install all the software on my servers, maintain connectivity, worry about configuring firewalls and other stuff like that, it’s liberating not to worry about all that any more. But there’s a learning curve to the hosted model also, so posts like this are only partly because I think you might find them interesting. They’re also for me, so I don’t forget how I did this stuff! 

Anyway, here’s how I did it:

1. Logged in to Dreamhost web panel.
2. Went to “manage domains”, and told it I wanted to host dynamicscrmusergroup.com on dreamhost.
3. Went to networksolutions.com and changed our dns servers to point to ns1.dreamhost.com…ns3.dreamhost.com
4. Went back to dreamhost web panel, and did the one-click install option to install wordpress to the DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com domain. I had to do the “advanced” version because the “easy” version doesn’t let you change domains, and I had to switch it from dynamicscrmtrickbag.com to dynamicscrmusergroup.com
5. Did the install, in the advanced option you have to create a new mysql database (I called it dynamicscrmusergroup) and a new host name (called it the same thing). It also wanted to create a new user account or admin account. It said it was done and I’d get an email in 10 minutes to my gmail account. (these settings shown in picture on next page). I was a little worried about creating yet another new account, with yet another new username and password I’d need to remember, but I was relieved when I saw that the username and password were going to be easy to remember. (username = xxxxx and password = ****** — except that the *s are really bullet points, as you can see from the following screenshot. Now I just need to figure out how to enter a bullet point directly from the keyboard and I’m all set!)