Entries for archive: 2008-05

Found 5 entries.

SoCNoC is Almost Upon Us

I haven't written much about KiwiWriter's SoCNoC yet this year but I have two reasons why.

The first is that I've been out of action, both mentally (hard at work), physically (moving house) and electronically (a myriad of problems getting back online).

But the good thing is, I don't actually have to write much for SoCNoC this year because other people are doing it for us.

Here's a few examples:

...but the best site goes to redfox for a dedicated mini-site:

You also know when things are taking off when people out there start making things for your site you just didn't expect :-)

In the real life side of things, we had write-ins in Wellington last year but this year we expect to have write-ins in Wellington, Dunedin and Palmerston North, as well as a NZ on-line kick-off party and an American one too :-)

For the techies and the stats people. May has already been a quite fantastic month. We have:

  • 87 participants
  • gotten over 20,000 hits on the site this month
  • had over 2,000 visitors
  • and gained over 120 new sign-ups

So far, it's going really well but hopefully June is going to be even better.

So if you're still pondering whether to write your first novel, why not just sign up anyway, accept the challenge and see what happens. You'll probably be surprised at what you can do :-)

Labels: kiwiwriters, socnoc, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-05-29 22:34 (2 years, 3 months ago)

Quick Help Moving from SVN to Git

Recently, I moved my Zaapt repository from a Subversion repository on Google Code into a Git repository on my server.

Here's some (really) quick instructions on how I did it. I'll be using it as a quick guide later and it may come in useful for you too.

If you want more detailed explanations on hosting Git repositories, see Nigel's excellent and more in-depth explanation. His takes you through a lot more cases (including the continued use of SVN, whereas this is about cutting the line completely).

Notes:

  • the local machine is called 'alpha'
  • the remote machine is called 'beta'
  • you will access the repo over ssh+git
  • it is private and not public
  • you repo will be stored in /var/lib/git which is writable by you
  • the project is called 'zaapt' but replace that with your projectname

Firstly some setup:

 alpha$ cd /tmp
 alpha$ mkdir zaapt
 alpha$ cd zaapt
 alpha$ git-svn init http://zaapt.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ --no-metadata

Then, you need to tell Git how to map Google Code usernames into commit names. I'm the only one who has commited to Zaapt so I just need one line:

 alpha$ cat > /tmp/users.txt
 andychilton = Andrew Chilton <andy@example.org>
 alpha$ git config svn.authorsfile /tmp/users.txt

Then you do the actual import. Two notes here. The first is that you don't want the initial repository version since that was created (as user nobody) when your Subversion repo was set up. The second I'm assuming you know the final version of your repo is 447:

 alpha$ git-svn fetch -r 2:447
 ...etc...

Earlier I said that we would be hosting our repository on our own server, so let's get a bare-bones repo without any of the SVN cruft left:

 alpha$ cd ../
 alpha$ git clone --bare --local zaapt/.git zaapt.git 
 alpha$ chmod +x zaapt.git/hooks/post-update
 alpha$ vim zaapt.git/description

Now copy the repo to your server. I'm assuming you want them in /var/lib/git:

 alpha$ scp -r zaapt.git beta:/var/lib/git

You're now done with everything we created in /tmp/ so remove them if you like. Now get a fresh clone of the new repo:

 alpha$ cd ~/git/
 alpha$ git clone ssh+git://beta/var/lib/git/zaapt.git

And if you want a checkout at the far end too:

 beta$ cd ~/git/
 beta$ git clone --local /var/lib/git/zaapt.git

That's it. Simple but it gets the job done for what I wanted it for.

For further reading, see Nigel's page above, Sam's extensive page on An introduction to git-svn... and Chris' page about publishing git repositories

Labels: git, planet-geek, svn, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-05-11 22:10 (2 years, 3 months ago)

SoCNoC is going to be mad again!

Last year's inaugural SoCNoC was an astounding success. None of us believed we'd made so many people write so much.

Here are the vital stats from last year:

  • 60 people signed up
  • 36 people wrote something
  • 16 finished (reached 50,000)
  • almost 1,000,000 cumulative words were written
  • many hours of fun were had socialising during it - writing isn't a lone sport anymore

This year we've been aiming at doubling it and getting to 2 million words. At first, I wasn't sure but here's a blog entry I found for this time last year:

Amazing take up for SoCNoC

By the 10th May last year we had 19 people signed up. This year we already have 44. That's over twice as many so let's hope it pushes on like this all the way through to the end of June.

I've said before that it's amazing how just a small group of friends and KiwiWriters.org organisers can influence such a great number of people to try something new and different. Not only that, but it's a whole lot of fun to do too - in between all the hard work of course!

It definitely pays off though. We might not be the biggest writing site in New Zealand [citation needed] but we're certainly the most exiting [weasel words] :-)

Labels: kiwiwriters, planet-geek, socnoc, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-05-11 00:11 (2 years, 3 months ago)

Things on the Go

Wow, it's been busy recently. Just thought I'd keep you abrest of what's been happening.

I've been:

As you can see, I'm liking Git :-)

Labels: git, cil, zaapt, debian, kiwiwriters, socnoc

Inserted: 2008-05-07 22:15 (2 years, 3 months ago)

Challenge Yourself, Do SoCNoC 2008

This coming June we're holding the second ever Southern Cross Novel Challenge where we KiwiWriters challenge you to write 50,000 words during the calendar month.

I have signed up already and am happy to show off my participant's icon:

If you've ever thought about writing a novel or even just fancy trying something different, joining KiwiWriters and challenging yourself is a great way to expand your mind. Yes, it's that good!

So come on over and let's have some fun.

Labels: kiwiwriters, socnoc, planet-catalyst, writing

Inserted: 2008-05-04 23:53 (2 years, 4 months ago)