BarCamp Montreal

October 29, 2006

Last weekend, I attended BarCamp Montreal where a mix of tech-savvy Montrealers gave informative and entertaining presentations on diverse topics that included:

A common theme of the presentations was harnessing the potential of the Web for conversation, collaboration, and group participation. I went to BarCamp to listen, to learn, to discuss, to question, to be inspired, and to network, and I was not disappointed. After attending the conference, I realized that the technology community in Montreal is alive and well, but perhaps more artistic and media-oriented than the tech communities in Ottawa and Silicon Valley.

Grande Bibliothèque and Safari Books Online

October 15, 2006

Did you know that Grande Bibliothèque (BAnQ) provides Québec residents with free access to Safari Books Online? This service lists books for online reading from publishers such as Addison-Wesley, No Starch, O’Reilly, Peachpit, Prentice Hall PTR, Que, and Sams. I found a few Ruby related O’Reilly titles that I recognized:

Though the Grande Bibliothèque Safari subscription allows you to search all books and read any book online, unlike a regular Safari subscription, it does not allow you to download individual book chapters for offline reading.

Ruby Montreal Minga 2

October 3, 2006

Last night, a small group of Ruby Montreal members met for the second Ruby Montreal Minga. Though there were just three of us in attendence compared with the eight who attended the first meeting, it was a more personal and focused meeting. We reviewed chapter 4 of the book Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition and started chapter 5. We plan to meet again in about two weeks to continue where we left off.

In case you don’t know, Ruby Minga is group of Ruby enthusiasts in Montreal who meet regularly to study Ruby programming related topics.

Typo and Missing DNS Record

September 12, 2006

I was a bit premature in declaring my Typo installation a success. Though my Apache Web server virtual host configuration was correct, I was missing one important piece of the solution. In order for http://blog.derekmahar.ca to be accessible to a Web browser on the Internet, I had to add a DNS ‘A’ record to my DNS name servers at ZoneEdit.

Now that my Typo weblog is running and visible on the Web, the next step is to configure its theme and migrate content from my blog sites here at Blogsome and Bloglines. Unfortunately, unlike Wordpress 2.0, Typo does not yet provide a means to copy content from one blog site to a Typo blog site.

Further reading:

Easy as Typo 1-2-3

September 10, 2006

I just installed the Typo blog engine on my website in about 45 minutes, which included the time it took to configure the Apache proxy, but did not included content customization or migration from my existing blogs. Even though the installation includes an example Apache proxy configuration template, the proxy configuration took about 80% to 90% of the total installation time. However, installing Typo itself was practically a no-brainer:

$ sudo gem install typo
(answer a few yes/no prompts)
$ sudo typo install /var/www/typo

These two commands install Ruby on Rails (if it’s not already installed), Mongrel, Typo, SQLite3, and some additional Rails plugins. Starting Typo was equally painless:

$ sudo typo start
$ sudo typo start /var/www/typo
Starting Typo on port 4231
$ ps -eaf --width=2000 | grep typo
root 15286 1 5 15:41 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start /var/www/typo -d false -e production -P /var/www/typo/tmp/pid.txt -p 4231

The first time that you load the Typo blog URL into your web browser, Typo asks you to enter a user name and password, and then promptly takes you to the Administration page. The Typo Administration page looks pretty slick and provides options similar to those that Wordpress offers, but it’s far more responsive than Wordpress at Blogsome. I’m not sure whether this is because Typo is more performant than Wordpress or because Blogsome has misconfigured Wordpress or their web servers. In any case, my Typo is snappy!

Interestingly, this post took me about 45 minutes to write, or same amount of time that it took me to install Typo. Wow, that’s fast!