geek

I decided to start adding additional functionality to this site. As much as I feel like I’ll benefit from having a place to focus my mental energy, having the tools to assist in that focus would be a huge plus. The first two things I thought of were a personal pastebin, and a revision control system.

Pastebin was fairly easy to get going. Since I’m using Nginx, the only pain was setting up the scripts for FCGI (as noted in my previous post). After that it was quite simple. The one problem I had was the SQL provided for pastebin didn’t work. It bombed on one of the KEYS. I didn’t feel like worrying about it, so I configured it to use files instead. Just as easy.

For a revision control system, I decided to try Mercurial. I’ve heard good things about it, and I know a few people who are running it as well. I also wanted to get a web frontend working. Nothing fancy, just enough to see what’s going on. My main goal for this was to put my rc files in an rcs of some sort so I can continue to modify them and review changes. I’ve been modifying them a lot lately, and found that bouncing back and forth between changes resulted in a lot of commented lines. It’ll also be nice to pull my rc files onto whatever machine I’m on, or if I can’t install hg, I can always just get them off the website. This was a little tougher to install. Most people suggest using Nginx as a proxy and use Apache as the backend server. I wound up going that route after many attempts as getting FCGI in Nginx playing nicely with Mercurial. But hey, now I have a place to house my rc files. Well worth the effort.