There have been a few blogging delays due to such family things as a new son! But also changing hosts – everything now hosted at Textdrive.
As ever, migrations always take time and indeed the blog got left on the old ISP for quite a while as I couldn’t face moving it! It has taken some fiddling to get everything working as it should. In the meantime I failed to get to grips with the new setup for some weeks and committed the cardinal sin of breaking old URLs to blog entries – for which I can only apologise and take my medicine like a man!
Have been playing with Subversion as installed here as the new mechanism of getting stuff up to the Textdrive machine since straight ftp is outlawed and my previous mechanism involved a hack of KFTPUpdater – a Python script which only uploaded changed files, but did it via vanilla FTP. I must admit it is nice to have Subversion installed and available for versioning as part of my account. That said I had a few niggles getting it actually working – finally found the relevant bits of information and made it. (p.s. I don’t find Textdrive’s Webmin admin interface the easiest thing since sliced bread). Even better I now have Perforce available to me as well, and have a machine running as the Textdrive guys nicely gave me a port to use. Hassles there too as originally the binaries for FreeBSD4.1 core dumped when run on FreeBSD5.4 so I put it aside for a bit. However, some server upgrade later and they magically now work fine. Thanks to Gordon Tetlow I even have P4Ruby installed locally since I couldn’t compile against the Perforce API built with GCC 2.95 when Textdrive have GCC 3.4 installed (and I didn’t fancy faffing around with a local VMWare install just to get things fixed).
I have been doing some research into new blogging engines and rather like the look of Typo (and need an excuse to get to grips with Rails!), so am hoping to head in that direction. However, I will first need to tweak it to add some article versioning – am still amazed that people gaily chuck all this text into databases and don’t version it in any form… (Have heard regular horror stories of databases being wiped and stuff being lost through injudicious SQL statements – no thanks). Given that I now have P4Ruby installed here, I am rather hoping that it will be very easy to make a few mods and save versions in Perforce as articles are added/edited etc. Will post on my experiences.
