Holy cow, I’m starting on a website

Heads up. I have no idea when I started writing this and I don't know why it was only a draft instead of being published. I can't even remember what project it was for :( So yesterday and today were spent setting up the structure of a java web application using maven. I had previously used maven at work but focus is on the project rather than the tool (probably as it should be). So I got to bang my head against a fresh script.
And boy, am I not happy.
It shouldn't take 2 days to put together something that just displays a page when deployed. I must admit that it is doing a lot of things that I don’t need yet like running tests, javadocing, test reports, general “what is this project” website etc.
Some of the problem was over naming, cobertura-maven-plugin and maven-cobertura-plugin is just confusing.
I also had a configuration issue with cobertura. Apparently it is really hard to put the generated file into a specific directory (since it is a derived resource, it should exist in the target/ directory). So the work around is to clean the file specifically.
[xml]

maven-clean-plugin

${basedir}

cobertura.ser

The other stuff that has been slowing me down is because it is the kind of configuration that you do at the start of a project and forget.
Like a working log4j.properties file. For some reason I wasn’t able to generate one that just worked, so I had to google around to find a default one and I’ll move from there.

Just need to get automated deploy and web tests happening and I should be able to start coding functionality