Yesterday, I successfully set up laconi.ca on a Linux box at home. I took copious notes, figuring that I would present them here. However, there is a good description of the process here. Good, that is, if you are using Ubuntu, have root privileges and feel comfortable doing things like apt-get and pear installs. Basically, I poked around and followed a path very similar to that. However, if you have a shared hosting service, without root privileges, is it still possible to get Laconi.ca up and running? Doing a little tweaking, it sure looks like it. Check out www.orient-lodge.com/laconica.

Essentially, what I did was took everything from my Ubuntu installation, rolled them into a nice little tarball and uploaded it to my hosting service. You can grab the tarball here.

Once you’ve unzipped the tarball and put it in a proper directory, you should be able to get going by a few simple steps.

Edit the config.php file. Really the only things you should have to do is change the $config['site']['server'] and the $config['site']['path'] . In my case, I set them to
$config['site']['server'] = 'www.orient-lodge.com';
$config['site']['path'] = 'laconica';

Then, you need to change the $config['db']['database']. If you are running on a shared host, you will probably set up the database, user and password using cpanel. Then, you will need to load the database with the laconica/db/laconica.sql file.

Next caveat. Go into the classes subdirectory and copy the stoica.ini file to a file with the name of your database. e.g., my username on my hosting service is smartcam. All of my databases get created as smartcam_dbname. So, I am using smartcam_laconica as my laconica database. I copied stoica.ini to smartcam_laconica.ini There is probably some other way to set this up in the config file, but I couldn’t figure out the syntax.

At this point, you should be ready to go. Other caveats to know. My site defaults to php4 so I have a directive in the .htaccess file to force it to php5. I also added code to the index.php to define sys_get_temp_dir if it doesn’t exist. Since I am running it as a subdirectory of my Drupal based site, which uses other rewriting rules, I ran into trouble with the rewriting, so I’ve left the ‘fancy’ mode (aka, use rewriting) turned off.

Later, I hope to tweak theme so it will look more like my Orient Lodge theme.

With this, I will have my own microblogging site, white labeled to look like part of Orient Lodge. I can still subscribe to microblogging posts over at identi.ca or other laconi.ca based sites. All of this on a shared hosting account. Note to the wise: This is all well and good for a small site, but I wouldn’t recommend running a large microblogging site, like identi.ca on a shared host. You’d be bound to run out of resources before you know it.