Always chasing the latest and greatest, I’ve decided that Apache ((http://www.apache.org)) isn’t doing it for me any more. After all, who wants to be running the server that powers 95% of the Internet ((Unverified))? So my search begins.

Week pass, and I don’t really think much of it. I teeter between “if it’s good enough for everyone, who am I to disagree?” and, “man, I wish I had a new project to learn with.” Fast forward to last night when I’m scanning through magazines at Borders. I look for the usual ((The usual used to include MacAddict, but they killed it)), and pick up Linux Journal. This month’s issue is dedicated to “The Underdogs” - the apps that aren’t the big boys, but are still great. Mutt ((http://www.mutt.org)) for those who don’t want fancy email things like graphics or rich text ((There are actually a lot of great things about it, like regex)), a handful of other things I’ve never heard of but should learn about, and Nginx, the little browser that could.

The mag had some tutorials on setting things up. Their focus was basic setup and advertising the reverse proxy and load balancing features, but my interests are PHP and Django hosting. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on Slicehost, and being a cheapo when it comes to hosting, I have a smaller slice. Nginx’s feature du  jour is it’s small footprint, making it an increasingly popular web browser for VPS hosts like me. I’ve managed to glue together enough tutorials to make the thing work, so hopefully by the time you’re reading this, it will be served by Nginx instead of Apache.

Once I get it settled, I’ll probably write up a nice “this worked for me, so go this route” type post, but for now, nothing. And that’s not to say it won’t stay off Apache forever - there’s a reason it’s the biggest server out there. But for now, I’m kinda digging Nginx. I guess we’ll see how things go when I start using Django.