Dev411 Blog: Category dreamhost

How to install SVK on Dreamhost posted

John Wang — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:50:00 -0500

I just posted my Installing SVK on Dreamhost notes on the wiki. I wasn't able to find any information on installing SVK, or Subversion with its Perl bindings for that matter, on Dreamhost so I took the time to work through it and document it (mostly because I believe SVK is essential to running a modded Typo). The end result looks pretty straight-forward but it was a reasonably time consuming process to backtrack all the errors, nail them down and find out if they are worth worrying about. In the end, the test failures weren't important but I wasn't willing to trust the SVK/SVN install without knowing for sure.

I was eager to get SVK up and running because it seems to be the popular way to keep one's private changes up to sync with a public repo. This is especially important for my Typo install as I have numerous Typo mods that I want automatically merged with new versions of Typo. Just recently we've had Typo 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2. I've been reluctant to make so many changes due to the manual merging I do now. Edge Typo and SVK, here I come!

Apparently Site5 doesn't come with SVK either so you can try to use this there. TextDrive, however, does come with SVK pre-installed.

Dreamhost and DNS hosting

John Wang — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 03:56:00 -0500

If you are hosting at Dreamhost, you are better off letting Dreamhost host the DNS for your domain as well. This is because Dreamhost can change the IP of your server without notifying you. They will update their own DNS servers when this happens but this won't help if you if your DNS is being hosted elsewhere. Use their nameservers and you should be all set.

Sometimes when the DNS is pointing to the incorrect IP, you'll see the following error:

Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.
error id: "bad_httpd_conf"

Planet Engines: Plagger and Planet

John Wang — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 23:16:00 -0500

Planet engines are applications that aggregate RSS/Atom feeds and generate composite feeds as well as a website. The generated feeds typically include RSS, Atom, FOAF and OPML. Two popular open source planet engines are Planet and Plagger. I've used both to create planet-style websites and here are my observations:

Planet: This is a Python-based planet engine originally created for Planet Gnome and Planet Debian. It is super easy to to install as there's not even really an install to speak of, you just untar it into place. The issue with Planet is that it has limited functionality and uses a monolithic architecture that makes adding features difficult. For example, the code to generate the HTML and XML files is in a 953-line file called __init__.py. I hacked a feature on to Planet a while back and had to modify some methods and add a new one to __init__.py. It worked but didn't seem clean or very maintainable so I'm reluctant to add even more features at this point. Here are my notes on Installing Planet.
Plagger: This is a Perl-based planet engine written by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa who currently works for SixApart, the makers of MovableType, LiveJournal, TypePad and Vox. Although Plagger is a planet engine it does a lot more and is really a pluggable RSS/Atom feed aggregation framework/platform that supports building planet-style websites via one of its many plugins. Its plugin architecture supports the following types of plugins: Aggregator, Bundle, CustomFeed, Filter, Notify, Publish, Search, SmartFeed, Subscription and Widget. Planet sites are generated by Plagger::Plugin::Bundle::Planet. Plagger will also send aggregated feeds to your email account using Plagger::Plugin::Publish::Gmail. This is similiar to what Newspipe (Python-based) does but Newspipe only does RSS to email. Configuring Plagger is simple once you've installed it, but installation can be tricky since it has many CPAN dependencies. However, it's not too difficult and I've done it on a dedicated CentOS server as well as on a shared hosting account at Dreamhost using these Installing Plagger instructions.

If you are interested in running a planet-style feed aggregation site, I highly recommend Plagger since it's just as easy to configure but has many more capabilities and a better architecture for extensibility. Installation takes a bit longer but give it a shot, it's worth it.