As a contractor I use github all the time to connect with client code and work on major projects. Github works incredibly well and will be a service I can see myself using for a long time.

My Problem

Where github falls down for me is for all the little projects I have that I want to keep in a DVCS but do not want to make opensource. Github charges by the number of private repositories rather than users so for someone who wants to keep maybe 20-30 projects on the go I could easily look at having to spend $50-$100 a month on storing and managing little projects that will probably never make any money because they will probably never be finished.

I will continue to use github to connect with clients and their code as it is by far the most popular service out there but for all those little projects I have been looking for a cheaper solution.

I have two basic requirements

• Distributed Source Control
• Issue Tracking

Source Control

BitBucket

First I am looking at bitbucket. Bitbucket now supports git as well as mecurial and charges by the number of users rather than the number of repositories which for a 2 man company like mamooba (Mamooba is the limited comapny that acts as a holding company for all my consulting and developing work and iDeveloper TV) is ideal. It has a nice interface and as far as git in concerned works in the same way as github. Bitbuket is free for up to 5 users which seems really generous.

Kiln

I am also looking at kiln from the folks at fogcreek. Kiln is based on Mercurial rather than git which I am a little uncertain about but know it’s close enough to git to not be a problem and used by enough people to proabably not go away. As these are all my own experimential projects interacting with others is not a big issue. Like bitbucket fogcreek charge by the user (A lot per user at $25 per month per user) but offer an unlimited 2 user account for free.

Issue Tracking

Having issue tracking for my own little projects might sounds a little over the top but in fact is incredibly useful. These are projects I work on in my spare time of which I have very little. However I will very often have an idea for one of them and being able to quickly add an issue/feature so that when I come back to the project possibly months later having all my thoughts right in front of me is really helpful.

BitBucket

I didn’t initially think that bitbucket supported issue tracking until I was told the other day that it does but you have to turn it on. As I didn’t know tit was there I haven’t actually tried it and have no idea if is any good or not

Kiln

Kiln is from fogcreek the makers of FogBugz an incredibly well known bug and issue tracking system. The free two user Kiln account also comes with a fully integrated FobBugz account. Now I know that FogBugz is probably massive overkill for my requirements but it does have the advantage that should I not get on with Kiln it can integrate into other DVCS systems so I could keep my issues tracker while changing my source control system.

Conclusion

I decided I wasn’t going to spend months trying systems I was just going to have a play , pick one and give it go on the basis that I believe (Possibly wrongly) that moving to an alternative at a later date will not be a huge issue.

I have suprised myself. I am going to start by trying out Kiln/Fogbugz. These are systems designed for hundreds of users and far larger than I will need. It also means I will be trying mercurial which also suprises me as I am a big git fan. It’s too early to tell if this is a move of genius or madness but feel quite confortable with my trial and will try and keep you posted on how it’s going.

When it comes installing cross platform tools such as Ruby on Rails on OS X I am bascially a complete idiot and therefore always look for a complete idiots guide. This was no different when looking to install Octopress on my developer machine.

I started by using the pretty straight forward guide found on the Octopress website but soon found things didn’t quite go as planned. It also didn’t help that I am running a developer preview version of my favourite OS X operating system.

Installing RVM

Octopress recomend using RVM to manage Ruby versions when using Octopress something that makes a lot of sense. However to install RVM you need gcc installed. Normally not a problem until you are using Xcode 4.3 or above where the command line tools are not installed by default.

No problem I just went to the Xcode preferences and choose the option to install the command line tools and then waited a while becuase I could currently get more bandwidth from a piece of string than I could from my rural broadband.

Installing Ruby

Ocopress requires Ruby 1.9.2 by default so with RVM installed that should just be a case of typing rvm install 1.9.2. However that genereated the result

the provided compiler '/usr/bin/gcc' is LLVM based, it is not yet fully supported by ruby and gems, please read rvm requirements

So instead I installed the latest (at this time) version of ruby 1.9.3 and that seemed to be OK.

The Wrong Version of Ruby

Ruby was installed but eveytime I switched into the Octopress folder I would get the message

WARN: ruby ruby-1.9.2-p290 is not installed. To install do: 'rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290'

I soon solved this one after taking a quick look at Aral Balkan’s post on installing Octopress and seeing that this could be resolved by by editing the .rvmrc file and changing its contents to read rvm 1.9.3 instead of rvm 1.9.2

rb-fsevent

Next it was time to install all the dependencies using Bundler but this kept crashing telling me

rb-fsevent 0.4 required Max OS X 10.5+

I guess this is probably as I am running a developer preview and it couldn’t verifiy the version of OS X.

However I could not understand why it was trying to install rb-fsevent version 0.4 when rb-fsevent is at version 0.9. Hoping for the best I edited the Gemfile file in the Ocopress directory and changed the rb-fsevents line to read

gem 'rb-fsevent', '>= 0.9'

tried again and it all seemed to work.

Up and Running

Other than that everything seems to be running as the docs suggest it should. I have been a Jekyll user for a while (The iDeveloper TV id generated using Jekyll) but have never used it for a blog becuase of having to create all the template files. Octopress is a layer on top of Jekyll that does a lot of that for me so I am looking forward to seeing how it all works out.

For a number of years I maintain a blog called “Waffle With Meaning” that I posted to about three or four times a year. One of those posts alway appeared in early January each year when I would promise that this year I would post more than I did last year.

This year I have managed to avoid making that post until late February. In order to cover my lack of posting over the last two years I thought I would not just convientiently delete all the old posts but also delete the entire blog and move it to and new server and at the same time drop wordpress as my blog platform and move to the ever more popular Octopress static blogging platform

So will I post to the new Waffle with Meaning more then I did the old one. I have no idea. My intention is this becomes an eclectic bucket for any random thought I might have about life, faith, technology or just about anything. As the title suggests to you it might just be waffle but to me it will have some sort of meaning