Last week while I was on vacation, I got my wife interested in using Pier for her Saluki website. I used the latest appliance with Pier 1.0.17. We made some changes to Pier like setting up the menu, changing the color scheme and removing some of the features included in the default Pier setup (post ticker on every page). My wife spent the bulk of the week playing with Pier – adding content and pictures.

By the end of the week she was very pleased with the potential – she’s been thinking of putting together a website bragging about our current and past Salukis. Pier is pretty easy for her to use and has just about everything she wants in her website and for the missing features and some of the nitty gritty details, she’s got me. I’m pleased because I’m sorta familiar with GLASS and if anything isn’t working right I have a reasonable chance of fixing it – I’d much rather be fixing things in Smalltalk:)

Last night while keeping an eye on the drubbing that the Patriots were putting on the Broncos, I installed GemStone/S 64 2.3 on Slicehost, following James’ instructions for GemStone/S and Miguel Cobá’s instructions for lighttpd. By the time the game highlights were being shown on ESPN, I had copied the extent0.dbf file from the appliance to the Slicehost instance and I had given my wife the basic instructions for starting and stopping lighttpd – we’ll not turn the site on full-time until my wife has finished building the site.

So far I haven’t deviated from the standard Seaside installation, but I know that I will be doing a few Pier-specific things like setting up PRFile to use MAExternalFileModel (scheduled for tonight) and possibly one or two other things which I’ll document as I go along.