Archive for the ‘Developing’ Category

Thy will be done: m2wp.py is released

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

After dragging my heels for a bit, I’m finally getting around to releasing my code for generating WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) files from Mephisto database.

I agreed with Stuart that it should be released regardless of demand, but it really did need some cleaning up first!

So, without any further ado, pomp, or ceremony I give you m2wp.py!

Oh, you actually want to see the code?

If you just want the file, you can grab it here If you just want to see the the code, you can see it here If you want to be all modern and distributed, you can grab the code using Bazaar like this*:
bzr branch http://labs.schwuk.com/m2wp

* Why aren’t I using Launchpad? Because I seriously doubt there will be any further development of this. However if people want to submit patches, they are more than welcome to and I will publish them in my repository.

A couple of caveats:

It assumes you’re using a PostgreSQL database. If you want something different, add it. Due to the wonders of WordPress, you can’t have tags and categories with the same name, but you can in Mephisto. You’ll need to fix this once you’ve imported into WordPress. The script is released under the GPL, and all that that entails.

Why developing your own blog software isn’t always a good idea

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

David Goodwin made the following comment on my post about migrating to WordPress:

Despite every ‘web2.0′ language/framework having a ‘create a blog application in 5 minutes’ example, it’s amusing to see even a developer default to Wordpress, which is still written for php4

I can see his point, and I agree that is amusing. Of course I’m not going to miss a chance to get on my soapbox though. :)
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Migrated to WordPress

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

First of all, apologies for any ‘planet spam’ caused the change to my feeds.

After what seems like an eternity (but is actually just over a year) I’ve switched the backend of this site from Mephisto to WordPress. The main reason for the switch was my overall dissatisfaction with Mephisto coupled with its lack of development (or a least stable releases) along with the fact that I was maintaining a Ruby on Rails production environment for one application. Mephisto frustrated me in many ways, from its inability to handle archives/pagination to not being able to accept pingbacks to not working with external clients. All of these were fixable, but I really didn’t have the patience or the time.

Here is my tale of migrating from Mephisto to WordPress, and how I achieved it.

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PyRoom

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

A while back I was discussing FOSS alternatives for cutting out distractions, and one of the pieces of software that I couldn’t find a decent alternative for was Writeroom which is commercial software for the Mac.

Now Bruno Bord (who’s basically French) has come to the rescue with the PyRoom project. I may have to get involved.

Bestseller?

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Just did a quick check on how my book – Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion – was doing on Amazon UK. They had stock earlier in the week, but it’s all gone now – that can only be a good thing!

I was also really pleased to see that I had made into the top 100,000 bestsellers – number 94,492 to be precise. Considering I’ve seen books ranked over the million mark, I’m very happy with my current position.

Managing Software Development available on Amazon

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

I looked my book – Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion – on Amazon when it was published, but I could not find it. Earlier tonight my wife went surfing earlier today and had more luck:

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Hard Copy

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Got back from swimming this morning to find a package left in the garage by the postman. I knew it was too soon to be my N800 (but that didn’t stop me hoping!), so I had no idea what it was. It turned out to be some complimentary copies of my book Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion.

My Book!

Although I knew the book was out, it’s not quite real until you’re actually holding a dead tree copy in your hands. Although I still haven’t decided whether I want to write another or not, seeing a real copy is swaying me toward doing it again.

A Fresh Cup

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Last night, thanks to Twitter, I got to renew a acquaintance with Mike Gunderloy (I was a big fan of his books Coder To Developer and Developer To Designer). I used to follow his Daily Grind blog as it was widely regarded as the source for Microsoft Windows related development news, but as my interest in the topic waned I dropped it from my regular reading.

Fast forward to yesterday when Mike added me as a friend in Twitter, I discovered his new (to me) site A Fresh Cup which both charts his transition to Ruby on Rails (and an Apple platform) and serves as a Rails version of the Daily Grind.

Mike’s tale is very interesting to me, especially having made the transition myself (albeit to Python, but I went via Rails and intend to revisit it soon), and I think it might inspire some others too. For obvious reasons I’d like to have seen Mike move to Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) but, as I was discussing with Josette (from O’Reilly) and Tony (whilst convincing him to get a Rails book) at the weekend, Rails and Macs still seem to go hand-in-hand so Mike’s choice was a natural one.

Oh, and Mike is using the same platform for his new site as I use here – Mephisto.

The job is dead! Long live the job!

Friday, April 20th, 2007

It’s finally here!

Today marks the last day of my employment with CSC. After 9 years (originally a freelancer, then the last 4½ years as a permanent employee) it is time to move to pastures new.

On Monday I will be joining Canonical as a developer on Launchpad (any comments about (open|free)ing of said product should be directed to Matt).

The best bit? Getting to work with a passionate group of people who believe in what they’re doing. The worst bit? Having to explain to non-technical family and friends what Canonical do. The best bit of the worst bit? Starting to explain it to the schwuklets, realising who I’m talking to, tell them they help make Ubuntu and schwuklet #2 (who is only 5 years old) knowing exactly what I’m talking about! :)

Of course every silver lining has a cloud, but you have to take the (dog) rough with the smooth. (I’d put a ;) in here, but you know how much he likes those…)

Introducing WebDev Control Panel

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Once upon a time there was a little project called the XAMPP Control Panel. An associate of mine had a hankering for a similar application to control specific services used for web development on his local machine, so I looked to adapt Jono’s project to his needs. However, as is often the case in these scenarios, I ended up scrapping the vast majority of his code and starting from near-scratch.

In a very short space of time a working result was achieved, but said associate no longer had a requirement for due to a change of platform. Rather than let it languish, I started adapting it to be more generic and removed some additional (and not fully implemented) functionality to create the WebDev Control Panel.

A project which promptly vanished into the depths of my hard disk and was mostly forgotten about. I fetched it out from time-to-time and tweaked a bit here, changed a bit there, but overall it sat collecting dust. I fully intended it to be released as Free software, but was loath to release in its current form.

Jumping forward to a couple of weeks ago, I needed to re-acquaint myself with Python, so I dusted off the project and started polishing it. I made the code more object-oriented; I converted it from a fixed list of services to a dynamic one (controlled by a config file); and finally I made it ready for translation.

Finally the time had come, and I could find no decent reason for putting it off any longer. I had to release it.

So, after that long introduction, here is the WebDev Control Panel. Enjoy.

WebDev Control Panel



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