September | 2008 | Software and Opinions

A couple of months ago my role at Songbird shifted a little. Up till then I was working on the core product, fixing bugs and adding features across the whole product as part of the bird engineering team. Since we started working on 0.7 (aka Fugazi) I moved into a group initially called strategic development which then split and merged with the design and product group.

We’ve been looking through feedback from our users, primarily through surveys to determine what features we can add that will address most users’ feature requests. Doing this outside engineering has been great since they can focus on improving the core product, keeping a clear vision of what the product we want should be, while we’re working directly from end-user feedback.

My first project was a new Last.fm addon using our new playback history API. It was installed by default for all Songbird 0.7 users so it’s had quite a bit of use, some good feedback, some bug fixes and now some translations:

My next project was taking Georges‘ Seeqpod addon, updating it and getting it ready for inclusion in Songbird. It wasn’t ready for Fugazi, but hopefully it’ll be ready for Genesis (our next release). Seeqpod is an MP3 search engine and our addon attempts to integrate it nicely into Songbird. I streamed a lot of random music while developing it. I spent a whole day listening to 80s Metallica.

Now I’m working on better music store integration using Songbird’s Web Page API.

Update: I don’t do this anymore.

I publish this blog through WordPress, for reasons I’ve outlined before. I run it with a custom theme and a bunch of plugins though, and I wanted a convenient way to keep my WordPress install up to date without having to reinstall everything all the time. I wanted source control for my blog install.

My first attempt involved mirroring WordPress SVN into a Git repository on github so that I had a Git version of the SVN tree (including branches, tags and every checkin separate) and seperate repository holding the changes I’d made for my web site. This eventually failed for two reasons, first the script I was using to mirror the SVN into Git had a habit of failing in bizarre ways and secondly having two repositories confused me.

Yesterday I decided to update my fairly outdated WordPress install, it had been missing security fixes for some time and was one minor version behind. Since tracking SVN hadn’t worked I tried a simpler approach, a single Git repository containing a master branch that tracks releases and an ianloic.com branch to track the state of my site.

I set up master with a fresh download of WordPress 2.5 from wordpress.com, created my ianloic.com branch and applied the differences between my site and the 2.5 SVN tag (for all it’s failures my old approach at least let me do this easily). I switched back to the master branch, deleted all the files (leaving my .git directory intact) and unpacked the new WordPress 2.6.1 tarball. I checked that in (to the master branch), tagged it 2.6.1 and then merged that into my ianloic.com branch. I pushed all that to github and then checked it out on my web server (at Dreamhost).

Normally with Git you’re tracking just the master branch, but I want both master and ianloic.com branches to be tracked so my .git/config contains:

[remote "origin"]
	url = git@github.com:ianloic/wordpress.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/master
[branch "ianloic.com"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/ianloic.com

Now it’s easy to track changes that I’m making to my site and update to the latest WordPress without risking losing anything. The process for updating to a new WordPress release is:

on my laptop check out the master branch
rm all the files except for .git from the directory
unpack the new release into the directory
git-add . — now git-status will indicate what has changed, been added or removed
git-commit to check in the new version of wordpress
git-tag versionnum to tag which version is currently in master
git-checkout ianloic.com
git-merge versionnum to merge the latest version into the site’s branch
git-push –all –tags to push all the branches and tags to github
on my web server, git-pull to update to the latest release

I end up with a tree that looks like this:

Software and Opinions

from Ian McKellar

Monthly Archives: September 2008

Meanwhile, in the day job

Tracking WordPress using Git