Getting Organized and Low Maintenance

It's been a while too long since I've posted. All of the systems I've been building for the last 18 months or so are starting to tie together very nicely. So why has it been a while since I've posted??

Like I said, the systems are starting to come together, which means I'm getting really excited and I want to accomplish everything, but alas, I'm only one person. I have recently started using BitBucket to host my private repos. I discovered that their FREE accounts are limited based on # of contributors, not # of private repos like GitHub. I've always wanted to use GitHub but the majority of my work is not something I can share openly, and therefore I don't use it at all. Unlimited private repos is exactly what I need right now, and knowing that I can have up to 5 contributors (including myself) is a high enough limit for now. If I need more than four others I should be able to justify the minimal expense of $10/mo.

Anyway, the feature that has me the most excited is the built in Wiki. The real feature in there that I really love is the ability to clone the wiki to my local machine, edit it there and push it back to update the wiki. The other awesome thing is I'm now going to use Pandoc to build the Wiki in HTML format and load it directly to our VPS. Nothing against the Wiki in BitBucket, and I wouldn't mind making it public... but it would require me to have a lot of non-technical people creating BitBucket accounts just to view the Wiki, that's not easy to use for them.

Here's how easy pandoc was to get up and running.

Installing pandoc on my development VM (Debian):

sudo apt-get install pandoc

A simple command to convert one markdown (.md) file to HTML:

pandoc Home.md -o Home.html

The good news is, now that I know how easy this was to do, I will start setting up all of my documentation in these Wikis, and I will create build scripts using Phing and Pandoc to generate whatever documentation I need to make available. Simple, fits into my workflow, and easy to maintain multiple formats of documentation within source control. It also encourages me to load all my projects to BitBucket, because a) no cost, b) another place my source code is stored, c) makes it easy to collaborate as new developers come on board!

Life is good!