It seems as though I'm only really getting time to work on the site on weekends, which is why this post is coming a week after the last one announcing a new feature. In any case, in addition to some behind-the-scenes improvements, I have added photo galleries, with some of my favourite photos. The galleries are a subset of the library, and can be found there.
This knocks another feature off my list of things I want the site to support before I consider it done. The others are commenting on blog posts, and possibly a way to get new posts via email, rather than RSS (I have noticed at least one RSS-to-email gateway in the logs, so obviously someone wants that), as well as a decent search/browsing system for the reference library.
I am afraid that I have to admit that the development of this site has until now proceeded in what any programmer must consider a state of sin: it was not under version control. Sure, I had periodic snapshot backups, but forget about versions, branches, and reverts.
The reason for this is that I was under the mistaken impression that my VCS of choice, git, made it difficult to set up remote branches. I think my confusion stemmed from the fact that it is somewhat tricky to set up public-facing ones with good commit-access control etc (which is why GitHub is so great).
Now that I looked into it more, I find it's actually tremendously easy, and I've got a really great work-flow set up: I have a master repo on the server, a development repo on my laptop, and another one in the directory from which the site is served. I can make changes on my laptop (and thanks to the magic of makefiles and m4 macros, keep a separate dev config file), and then push those to the master repository. When I'm ready to launch, I just pull them to the serving repo and run a make prod.
Setting all this up was surprisingly easy. The first step is to set up the master repo, using git --bare init. This initializes an empty repository, additionally specifying (via --bare) that git need not bother with anything but the repository metadata itself, and can ignore the actual working files. The two client repositories can then either be cloned from this master one, or if one of them already contains data, simply add the master as a remote branch. Pushing and pulling from one repo to another is now a breeze.
As a result of this exciting development, I've gotten around to fixing up the reference library somewhat, although it still lacks any kind of searching or sorting, not to mention pagination.
Although it's rather short notice, anyone in the Toronto area should consider going to the University of Toronto Earth Sciences Auditorium tomorrow, Friday, February 20th, for a 7:30 PM (doors open at 7:00 PM) screening of the award-winning documentary Orphans of Apollo. This Canadian première event will feature a talk by the producer, and will be followed by a reception. Admission is $10 for students and seniors, and $15 for the general public.
Despite the rather unfortunate choice of logotype, Orphans of Apollo sounds like a fascinating documentary:
Orphans of Apollo is the extraordinary true story of MirCorp, a rebel group of entrepreneurs who commandeered the Russian Mir space station-by leasing it from the Russian government. The film documents the pioneering efforts of bold men who fought to open space for all humanity and launched the New Space Revolution.
Now, I have not seen it myself, and given that Seattle is not in the neighbourhood, I will not be seeing it any time soon, but the MirCorp story is an extremely interesting one; they were well ahead of their time with their vision for commercial space exploration.
If you are interested in events like these, consider joining the mailing list of the Waterloo Space Society, from which I received notice of this screening.