Miguel Landaeta

In my opinion you can learn a lot following the development process of Mongrel2. Mongrel2 is a redesign of Mongrel web server and it is a project that have as goal to provide an application, language, and network architecture agnostic web server.

This is probably the most interesting project that I could find right now on the web, because it is under heavy development, it is using new concepts and ideas, it is written in C (very clear and legible code if you ask me), the development process is totally in the open, and this could benefit many people if successfully achieve its goal.

Because of that, and because of the very big bold goal of this project I'm following its progress, I'm testing it and I plan to contribute with Mongrel2 if possible. By now, I'm only contributing from the distribution side of things, so I prepared some packages necessary to test Mongrel2 in Debian (despite Mr. Zed Shaw is very critic of the ``slowness'' of Linux distributions picking new software).

Anyway, below are some links to binary and source packages for Mongrel2 and a couple of dependencies, if anyone besides me is interested in testing this in Debian (or Ubuntu). I already asked for review to have those packages included officially in Debian.

• mongrel2: binary, source, git, upstream.

• python-storm (needed to use m2sh): binary, source, git, upstream.

• python-zmq (needed to run the examples included with mongrel2): binary, source, git, upstream.

Since a while ago I was aware of the possibility of hosting an ikiwiki generated website at github using github pages. This is described with great detail on tips section of ikiwiki website.

Later, it was announced the possibility of using custom domains with github pages, but unfortunately this feature was available only to paying customers. Don't get me wrong, github is fantastic and they provide a service really worth paying for (especially for private projects), but for a dollar starved guy like me, I try to avoid any expense in foreign currency.

So, it was cool to find out that the custom domain feature for github pages now is free. I decided to give a try and migrate this website hosting there. I could save a few bucks with hosting and gained the feature of updating my website using git standard tools (pretty awesome and convenient if you ask me, with one push you can publish updates or revert changes).

I'm going to investigate options about how to implement the dynamic portion of ikiwiki (ikiwiki.cgi, and maybe comments), but for now my main use case of ikiwiki is covered with github pages provided hosting.