I haven’t been updating this site or the software running it very much for the last year and a half. Time sure flies. In the mean time, ideas evolve and mature. So after reading about Toto, a tiny Ruby + git blog software, I resolved to update nnmc and finally implement a few idea I had at the beginning. Here is what I did today:

• I now use git (via github) for the version control of the software. You can now peek at the ugly php code behind this site.

• I also use git for the content. Unlike Toto, I use a separate repository for the content of the website. I don’t have templates but I have a few different categories of content, not just a blog. As the content is easily scrapable from the web, I just made the raw source available on GitHub (also, it will not count toward my private repo quotas).

• I finally created a setup script to handle the different configuration between the local (dev) version and the production (remote) sites. You can peek at it.

One nice idea of Toto that I like very much is to not have a component to edit the content from the web. I didn’t create that much content via the web interface anyway. That sure simplifies the security aspect, especially when you can’t have ssl on your host. I’ll see when I have time to remove it.

To migrate this website from being a set of files to being a checkout off github, I had to do a bit of research to find a way around using git clone. The problem was that I wanted to checkout the content of the repository in the public directory from where files are served, not create a ‘nnmc’ dir and symlinking that. So here is what I did, after ssh-ing into my account. I ran the following commands from /home/public directory that serves the files.

To get the software :

git init
git remote add origin git://github.com/nicolasH/nnmc.git
git fetch origin

The following command will actually make the files appear in the directory. I use the -f to overwrite the files that are both in the repository and on the website.

git checkout -f -t origin/master -b master

Then just symlinks the .htaccess and config.php to the prod_ files:

bash setup.sh prod

To get the content is much simpler, as it was already in a separate directory:

git clone git://github.com/nicolasH/content_nnmc.git

And “that’s it”. I can update either the content or the software with a git pull. Which I will have done to update this post.