How to go about this?

Well, I’ve identified the steps I need to go through to migrate the site from WordPress to a Ruby based site, either Rails or Sinatra (just to try my hand something a little different). Actually if heroku get it sorted in time I may throw together a Node.js application — they can be fun.

These aren’t necessarily in the right order at but I will approach them all independently and hope to blog through the process.

1. Extract the current site’s data into a manageable format
2. Design a data structure for a new site
3. Migrate the data from Step 1
4. Create or choose a blogging solution
5. Implement Step 4

I’ve already made a start on a site design, I’ve got my data saved and have chosen a method of parsing it, which will form the next blog post.

“TOTU is an opportunity for everyday people to express a part of their lives, a snapshot of faith, or quite simply, an encounter of God – and that’s always worth talking about”

I hope you enjoy watching the videos and maybe feel inspired to share.

So, the site is now live. Enjoy!

The word Huffduffer derives from a technology called Huff-Duff [HF/DF] that was used to triangulate the position of radio transmissions. Huffduffing on the web is a way of pin-pointing interesting MP3 files.

Jeremy Keith spoke to Refresh Belfast in December and while I gave up on producing the video because it was so dark in the venue I simply forgot that I’d taken a HQ line out of the sound desk with the recording.

So here in all it’s glory is “Jeremy Keith talking about Huffduffer on Huffduffer about Huffduffer.”

Enjoy.

For a recent client project I’ve used a Dreamhost unlimited account, which for value compared with the resources available and the fact that you don’t have to do any building or setting up of the server environment makes it an easy win for a site that’s not going to have a huge amount of traffic or a large amount of processing.

Post-launch I got to work putting together a basic search engine and here’s a quick run through of the steps it took to get a very simple Sphinx instance working on Dreamhost, and a few hurdles thrown in the way by various googled articles.

Development Environment

Using the guide from FG install Sphinx locally:

curl -O http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8-rc2.tar.gz
tar zxvf sphinx-0.9.8-rc2.tar.gz
cd sphinx-0.9.8-rc2
./configure
make
sudo make install

then install the TS plugin into your application

script/plugin install git://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git

Any problems with that, check out the FG page linked.

Getting a basic search going

Following tutorials such as the Sphinx Railscast will get you there pretty quick.

In your searchable model you need to define an index

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  define_index do
    indexes :title
    indexes :long
    indexes :short
  end ...

Run the indexer and start the Sphinx instance:

rake thinking_sphinx:index
rake thinking_sphinx:start

After this you'll be able to search on your object. So using script/console

@searched_pages = Page.search("query")

will return what you're looking for!

Setting up Dreamhost

First things first you need to install Sphinx in your local area, as posted by Hugh Evans:

cd ~/
mkdir -p local
wget http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz
cd sphinx-0.9.8.1/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/ --exec-prefix=$HOME/local/
make
make install

then set up the PATHs

echo "export PATH=\"$PATH:~/local/bin\"" >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

You can choose to set up a CRON task at this point too, but I'm not going into that.

Also at this point in the there's talk of using Sphinx being anti TOS in DH's eyes... but we'll see does the process get killed or not!

Configuring Sphinx for DH

Create a file called sphinx.yml in the RAILS_ROOT/config/ folder.

Because Dreamhost uses an externally referenced MySQL server instead of localhost you need to set up the sql_* parameters:

  sql_host: "mysql.YOURDOMAIN"
  sql_port: 3306
  sql_user: "USER"
  sql_password: "PASSWORD"
  sql_database: "DATABASE"

And because you installed Sphinx in your local area:

  bin_path: '/home/YOURUSERNAME/local/bin'

Finally, after setting whatever memory/fine tuning settings you wish/require set up the locations for the Sphinx files:

  config_file: "/home/YOURUSERNAME/DOMAIN.co.uk/shared/production.sphinx.conf"
  searchd_log_file: "/home/YOURUSERNAME/DOMAIN.co.uk/shared/log/searchd.log"
  query_log_file: "/home/YOURUSERNAME/DOMAIN.co.uk/shared/log/searchd.query.log"
  pid_file: "/home/YOURUSERNAME/DOMAIN.co.uk/shared/log/searchd.production.pid"
  searchd_file_path: "/home/YOURUSERNAME/DOMAIN.co.uk/shared/db/sphinx"

That should be you ready to start deploying.

Deploying

Using Git + Capistrano for deployment (and Passenger for the http server) my deploy.rb's namespace area looks like this:

namespace :deploy do
  task :restart do
    after_symlink
    restart_sphinx
    run "touch #{deploy_to}/current/tmp/restart.txt"
  end

  task :start do
    # nothing  (this avoids the 'spin' script issue)
  end

  desc "Re-establish symlinks"
  task :after_symlink do
    run <<-CMD
      rm -fr #{release_path}/db/sphinx &&
      ln -nfs #{shared_path}/db/sphinx #{release_path}/db/sphinx
    CMD
  end

  desc "Stop the sphinx server"
  task :stop_sphinx , :roles => :app do
    run "cd #{current_path} && rake thinking_sphinx:stop RAILS_ENV=production"
  end

  desc "Start the sphinx server"
  task :start_sphinx, :roles => :app do
    run "cd #{current_path} && rake thinking_sphinx:configure RAILS_ENV=production && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production && rake thinking_sphinx:start RAILS_ENV=production"
  end

  desc "Restart the sphinx server"
  task :restart_sphinx, :roles => :app do
    stop_sphinx
    start_sphinx
  end

end

There's probably a neater way to do this, but basically this makes sure Sphinx's indexes and conf files live in the shared deployment folder.

I recommend you try all this in a staging area first, obviously... and you can use Dreamhost's control panel to set up a staging subdomain with a new database in whatever fashion you prefer.

Any problems with this script flag them up, please! This is as much for my future reference as you googlies out there.

Leopard has PHP and Apache fairly up to date, and probably MySQL as well, but I decided to get MySQL up to scratch using the Universal Binary along with a few command line instructions available here (guide and links to downloads).

I didn’t use this script myself, and at a year old it may have a few imperfections, but HiveLogic have a fairly well rounded Ruby/Rails install going on.

Finally, WordPress to go on your LAMP stack will be a lot less painful using this guide for Tech Recipes.

Any suggestions additions or replacements for this list? Drop a comment!

I think it might prove useful: http://www.unethicalblogger.com/blog_categories/git will be taking a read in my spare time.

These render files however are the same ones that are used to put together the ‘finished product’ if you don’t use one of the Quicktime Conversion options.

If your output (to DVD or whatever) is choppy and you think the frame rate is possibly messed up the easy way to check is to pause your Quicktime movie, then use the left and right keys to move through frames. If each pair of frames is the same then you have not got a full output. To resolve it, go to your User Preferences screen, click Render Control and select 100% from the Frame Rate drop down.

I did fix this problem several months ago, but seeing as I am waiting for something to render I thought it was an opportune moment to write it down.

—–

Update: pssst don’t forget to try deinterlacing if your video looks rubbish

This Saturday evening Live from the Odyssey Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland, HiDavid Ltd and giantslive.com are proud to present to you the Belfast Giants in action for the first time this season as they face the Cardiff Devils.

The Elite League kicks off it’s new season this weekend and you can check out all the action from Belfast this year live on the web. It is our intention to broadcast all of the games from home ice this season live and for free, so tune in on Saturday about 6.45 to giantslive.com (the website will be live Friday morning).

Also available this year we will be selling DVDs of each match-up, ready and available to buy at the next home game and who knows maybe there’ll be a ‘season ticket’ DVD offer for those who wish to buy all games.

Watch here -> http://www.giantslive.com

Just like when Jessica was learning the song.. every time she asked “what chord comes after ‘angels’?” the answer is ‘C.’ Every time.

When something goes wrong with a video project, what is the problem? Rendering. RENDERING.

The problem is not just waiting for the render to take place, that has become a non-issue in the last year or so, I’m used to it. But what really bugs is when there are two folders

TODO LIST:

• Have only one render folder selected for A and V
• If you have any problems go into the “/[Audio ]Render files/Project Name” folder and trash it all (clear trash)
• And force re-render after re-starting Final Cut.
• THEN re-encode the DVD 

—–

And on another note, WHY does the FOX tv channel always, perputally broadcast distorted audio? I was channel flicking a few nights ago and had to turn it off it was annoying me so much (so unlike me), and in any case it was pre-season NFLstuff.  Not that interesting, lots of football-nerd talk (c.f. above).

—-

PS I think this one qualifies for RANT status, though it should probably be filed under the SCHOOLBOY ERROR column as well.

There’s two videos on the right hand side of that page which I put together for those in charge. Hope they go well!