Digital Ninja

Woe is me, I've been sat on a stool by Subversion. Well, let's be serious. Not really by Subversion, but by a hosting provider, Apache, and my own unpreparedness. But it's easier and less wordy to simply blame Subversion (although not fair). Let me take you through my series of events.

First, the free project host Assembla made an announcement early this week that by the end of this week their initially-awesome and free service would no longer be free, and therefore not quite so awesome. They basically said they're locking things down on JAN 9 so pay up or get off the server. I'm sort of in the middle of a project I was hosting there, and I'm not feeling in the giving mood so I'm outta there. You can disregard my positive-toned blog post last year about how great Assembla was. The free SVN hosts out there many, and yes Assembla - they also do project management and ticketing solutions! For free!

So all of a sudden I'm looking for a new host for my SVN repo of a private project I'm working on. A colleague recommended Beanstalk, which I had already found and was considering on my own (not to mention I saw it pimped by Versions). So with all signs pointing to Beanstalk, I'm headed over there for a little while to test the waters. I might even become a paid member. The rates are good.

I was able to download a Subversion dumpfile of my work, but it's not in a very cleaned-up state. I wanted to do some filtering with it, and I needed Subversion. So I downloaded it and tried to install it but the Apache WebDAV wasn't playing ball. Turns out I have an older (2007!) version of Apache, which was part of the XAMPP distribution from Apache Friends. That's an excellent package, by the way, and I recommend it for anyone wanting to throw together their own development server in near-zero seconds. The ColdFusion 8 installer will play nice with it, too, and get it's hooks in.

Skipping a few details and hours of frustration trying to get configuration from the Collab-bundled install of Apache into my XAMPP installation, let me just say that it was all about my older XAMPP. I threw some caution to the wind, only backing up my Apache modules and the conf directory, and did an overlay install of the latest XAMPP over the old one. Whala! It's all working. All of it, including the WebDAV SVN integration and the MySQL configuration and heck - CF is alive and well!

Looks like I lucked out this time, sort of. Now I'm going to use the SVN dump filter to trim up my dump file and import it to Beanstalk, beginning chapter two of this damned SVN hosting ordeal. And I guess I'm about to become a Basecamp man, too. I was really trying to avoid that for some unknown, inner-child reason.

Do you ever feel like you're spending all of your time organizing your projects and not enough time developing them? Yeah, that's me these days. I was just thinking that I really wish I had this SQL script I was working on last week in SVN somewhere, but I don't. And now I have to remember how that syntax went. Or rather, since my memory is as reliable as a three-legged cat trying to bury it's business on a frozen pond, I'll be researching it all over again.

I suppose the bright side of the apple is that having researched the same thing twice should mean I'll have a better chance at remembering it. Right?

Oh, and before I forget to mention, we have a semi-reliable comparison between CF7's un-cached implementation of the CMS at work and the CF8 cached version. The number of DB calls for a content-by-node-path call went from (brace yourself) 22,000+ down to 900 and change. :) Something tells me we're going to get more life out of that piece of hardware now.

Thoughts while performing an upgrade while at the office in the late hours.

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