We’ve moved our office and we are now slap-bang in the middle of Malvern with better transport links and many more lunch options.

Our new address is:

The Darwin Rooms
1 Worcester Road
Malvern
Worcestershire
WR14 4QY

Tel: 01684 576 700

Siftware’s first web application sw0p.com came one step closer to being a reality today when we launched the holding site in the run up to us launching it as a beta service around Christmas time.

sw0p.com will allow individuals to trade their items and skills with other members with no money changing hands. The site will be free for all to use with no limitations.

Behind the scenes we are working hard to finsh the last few major tasks and we’re really looking forard to launching this service in the coming months.

Last weekend I attended my first barcamp ‘unconference’ in Bath called, unsurprisingly, Bathcamp.

It was absolutely brilliant.

There were around 60 attendees a number of whom are now listed on the bathcamp blog and the split was around 70%/30% web geeks and educational/knowledge management types.

There were three areas at the venue and the talks varied from the more standard technical web development techniques (which I mainly attended) to how to make a good Espresso and my personal favourite which was Frankie Roberto’s dead-pan delve into the world of the serious Lego geek.

Siftware sponsored the booze for the evening at the venue and I put on a ‘tub quiz’ with prizes, amongst others, of a $50,000,000,000 note. The quiz seemed to go down rather well; I know I enjoyed putting it together.

Kudos to the organisers of the event whose forward planning ensured the weekend went very smoothly. A particularly big shout out to Mike Ellis, Tim Beadle, Frankie Roberto, Lisa Price & Steve Pope who I’m sure didn’t sit down for the 2 days.

I made some great new friends, put faces to names I’ve known for 10 years and have not laughed so much in ages (you know who you are!).  Overall I came away on Sunday feeling inspired and with that warm glow you get after putting another good time in the bank.

Go Bathcamp.

A few other attendees have blogged about the day or posted their slides. I’ll add them to this list as and when I get the links:

• Matt Jukes: http://backpass.org/2008/09/16/briliant-bathcamp/
• Keir Whitaker: http://www.fiveandlime.com/journal/2008/09/14/10-reasons-you-should-try-django (annoyed I missed this one)
• Drew Jones: http://andij.com/2008/09/07/sfimagetransform-presentation
• Jack Martin Leith: http://www.jackmartinleith.com/?p=1237
• Sam Downie: http://bristol-sounds.com/dsoundzmedia/?p=99
• Frankie Roberto: http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/881
• Mia Ridge: http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2008/09/bathcamp-report.html
• Mike Ellis: http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2008/09/23/that-wasbathcamp-2008/

Addendum:

Here’s the quiz slides with answers, as requested by a few people. Apparently it was too hard?

Here’s the answer sheet.

Today Google released its new web browser called Google Chrome as a public beta, you can download it here.

You could ask why bother releasing a new browser when there’s IE 8 in beta, Firefox 3 recently released, Apple’s Safari and at least 10 people use Opera. They pre-empted this perfectly reasonable question by releasing a really well done comic strip explaining their reasoning, prior to today’s launch.

In short they are saying that the UI is much improved, each tab is its own process (so if one crashes the whole things doesn’t close), Javascript can be multi threaded (no more wating for a process to finish before another one starts) and multiple security & privacy improvements.

First impressions after the speedy install and it automatically importing my Firefox bookmarks (particularly the toolbar & without adding extra rubbish) are good.

Immediate likes:

• Speedy rendering (though to be fair Safari is also based on WebKit)
• Folder like tab that one can drag out into a new window (with page preview)
• The magic auto complete address/search bar seems pretty clever and I’m also liking the colour coding in the addresses
• Text areas in web pages are stretchy
• Javascript debugger and HTML/CSS inspector
• There’s a task manager showing what each tab is doing/using
• Gmail hasn’t crashed yet

I’m not so keen on:

• No taskbar, though I see that mousing over links brings up a small tooltip at the bottom of the screen
• Find is Ctrl-F and I so love the ‘/’ of Firefox matching Vim’s control
• Really missing right-click and left for back (using mouse gestures)
• No web developer toolbar (another FF extension) or ability to see at a glance if a page validates though to be fair it’s very early days
• Really surprised to see that zoom has taken a step backwards and doesn’t zoom images.

So in reality my only dislikes are that I’m missing some Firefox add-on features which for a browser only released in the past few hours isn’t too shoddy at all especially as I could ‘make do’ with the in-built debugging support.

I’ve set it as my default browser and we’ll see how I get on for a extended period, first signs are promising, though.

It was nice to see today that the custom tag that I built for CMS Made Simple has exceeded 4000 downloads.

Random Global Content Blocks enables the template editor to specify a range of content blocks to show and then the tag does the work of deciding which one to display per page load. It even supports a regular expression syntax so as long as a given naming convention is adhered to new items can be added through the CMS without the need for template modifications.

For example:
{random_gcb block_regex="^case_study_"}

This would mean that any global content block starting with the name starting case_study_ would be included in rotation, randomly.

You can download the tag here or read more about Siftware’s CMS Made Simple installation and customisation services.

We’re delighted to launch the newest version of our website which replaces the original one launched 2 years previously.

This version incorporates the blog you’re reading which we’ll be posting to with a mix of company information and technical snippets. It has also been updated with a slightly tweaked brand and details of our streamlined service offerings to better reflect the work we’re now doing.

In summary these service offerings are:

• CMS Made Simple installations, theming & customisations
• Wordpress blog installations, theming & customisations
• Skinning and customisation of Third Light’s Image Management System
• Bespoke Symfony & PHP development

We’ve also added a briefing form for users wishing for us to provide a quote.

The Multipack describes itself as “a community of multi-talented Web professionals from across the West Midlands” and attending one of their meetings has been high on my list for over a year now. This Saturday I finally made the effort to get to Birmingham for the March meeting and it was definitely worth it.

I got there a bit late so didn’t manage to speak with all of the 15 or so people in attendance as the seating was initially an awkward L-Shape but they seemed a friendly, knowledgeable bunch and people started moving around soon enough. Discussions ranged from Mark James (of FamFamFam fame) describing the features of his pseudo-UML source code generator, the merits (or not) of twittering ones every mundane thought and super-mobile notebooks. I also got to put a face to the name of Owen Gregory, had a general business chat with Noel Welsh and Dave Gurnell of Untyped, bumped into Sukhi Dehal again and had a good chat with Tim Gaunt on the train home who also happens to be a fellow Underscore subscriber.

I’m particularly excited by The Multipack as it’s (as far as I know) the only general interest gathering of web types round these parts, I like its relaxed beer and geekage attitude and although it’s a bit of a mission for me to get to - 1.5 hr journey each way including a £20 cab fair for the last stretch home from the train station (although that’s my fault for wanting to drink and living in the middle of nowhere) - I do think Birmingham is a sensible location for the meetings. I did also raise the subject of there being a mailing list aspect to the group which, as I’ve mentioned previously elsewhere, would mean that people don’t have to remember to visit a website to have a conversation; everyone’s got email, right?

If you’re into web and available for the next meeting on the 12th of April then you should definitely come along. It’s already in my diary.

Update: There *is* a mailing list, hooray. http://groups.google.com/group/multipack

As long-term PhpED user I’ve always been well aware that I was not making the most of some of the more powerful features of my IDE, particularly the debugging capabilities. Well this week I finally got debugging set-up properly and as per most of my other blog posts I’m listing what I did here for future reference and just in case it helps anyone else. (more…)

I’ve already installed Trac and I now want to be able to set-up multiple projects with the minimum of fuss.

My requirements are:

• Not having to mess with the Apache configuration every time I add a new project because I don’t want to have to restart apache
• Make some simple modifications to the stanadard trac.ini so that, for example, the logo at the top links to the home of that trac project
• Improve upon the default authentication where logging out involves closing the browser (which is a drag when accessing multiple projects)
• Change the default wiki page text

The most important job is to get Apache set-up properly. I’m using mod_python so:
apt-get install libapache2-mod-python

I then set-up a VirtualHost for http://my.trac.url, thus:

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /var/www/my.trac.docroot
ServerName my.trac.url
ServerAdmin webmaster@my.trac.url
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
TransferLog /var/log/apache2/trac-access.log
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/trac-error.log

<LocationMatch "/.+/">
SetHandler mod_python
PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonPath "sys.path + ['/export/trac']”
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /export/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /
</LocationMatch>

</VirtualHost>

Note the LocationMatch. From the docs:

This will instruct Apache to use mod_python for all locations different from root while having the possibility of placing a custom home page for root in your DocumentRoot folder.

Therefore in /var/www/my.trac.docroot I’ve placed a one line PHP script that redirects users to our main website url.

After restarting Apache I then set-up a new project ‘project1′ as per my mini Trac install how-to and visiting http://my.trac.url/project1/ gives me the vanilla Trac interface so we know it’s all working.

The rest of the configuration is with Trac itself and is down to personal requirements and mine are already listed above. I’ve scripted everything I need to do to get a new project up and running and don’t intend to go though it all here. You can however download it and use it for your own purposes. You use this at your own risk and you should bear in mind the following cavets:

• Assumes that the Account Manager plugin is already installed. I did easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/accountmanagerplugin/trunk
• The first user input is used as the Trac project name AND should match the name of the already set-up svn project
• I’m using MySQL on the backend
• A few of the trac.ini settings at the end are hard-coded though it is easy to change them

I’m a lot more impressed with this version of Trac than the much older version we were using before and with the above set-up I can now have a project up and running within a few minutes.
Related
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracModPython
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AccountManagerPlugin

The following is a no-frills install guide for getting Trac up and running on a Debian ‘etch’ Linux system.

The assumption is that you’ve already got mysql and subversion working and have created a subversion repository (tip: apt-get install mysql-server subversion).

The first thing that we need to do is install Python, easy_install and the mysql & python bindings:
apt-get install python python-setuptools python-mysqldb python-subversion

To install trac via the easy_install command I suggest that you see what is the newest version of trac:
svn list http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/tags

I then picked the newest tag and then installed:
easy_install http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/tags/trac-0.11b1

I want to use the - note: experimental - MySQL support so I create a mysql db and create a trac user:

mysql> create database trac;
mysql> grant all on trac.* to trac@localhost identified by 'password';

To test it is all working I create our first project:

trac-admin /export/trac/MY_PROJECT initenv

A number of self explanitory questions are asked, here are selected answers:

Database connection string [sqlite:db/trac.db]> mysql://trac:password@localhost:3306/trac
Path to repository [/path/to/repos]> /export/svn/MY_SVN_REPOSITORY

Finally, test it is working:
tracd --port 8000 /export/trac/MY_PROJECT

Visiting http://server:8000/MY_PROJECT gives me the standard trac web interface and I can browse the SVN repository. There, that wasn’t too bad was it? We do still need to get it all sensibly configured so once I’ve done that I’ll post another article.

Related:
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInstall