philwilson.org

A number of different things have come together for me today, this post titled Is there a need for New Newsreader?, Zeldman’s post about distributed content and Kent brewster’s FOAFster which linked me off to all the things that MyBlogLog provides (a service I’ve never really looked at very closely).

These have tied together with thoughts I’ve been having about wxVenus, and more generally about social-network-on-the-desktop type software for the past few years. It makes me think again about how I browse feeds, how I access them and when.

Since people started outsourcing their content stores to del.icio.us and Flickr, and using blogging systems to produce their content, they’ve all suddenly got feeds for this content, so should the method of navigation actually be by person, rather than blog title? Obviously this is how systems like FriendFeed work, but it doesn’t yet seem clear to me how this relationship between a person and their data is best expressed and how to best obviate much of the need to either boil the ocean (get everyone to sign up to friendfeed) or to automatically assign feeds to a person (acronyms like “RDF” and “FOAF” spring to mind but don’t seem to actually be useful in this example).

For my use-case it’s rare that I subscribe to a lot of content from a lot of people, rather I subscribe to most of the content my friends are producing, and a single source of content from some stranger on the internet whether it be their blog or Flickr photos. From where I sit, these are two fundamentally different ways of viewing data: person-centric and data-centric and I’m less and less convinced that it’s possible to model these two views in the same application, or at least expose data sources from the two views at the same time.

There seems to be a fundamental mismatch between the way we use aggregators (whether they be river of news, multi-pane windows or whatever) and the way we consume information from people we know. I have no idea what the resolution of this impedance is, but I’d really like someone to come up with a good solution sometime soon.

This is a summary of what I got from the Trac installation instructions here, here, here and here. My life would have been easier if I was running Apache2, but for the site in question, I’m not.

The version numbers I am working with:

• apache - 1.3.34-4.1
• python - 2.4.4-2
• libapache-mod-python 2:2.7.11-2
• Trac 0.11b2

Install easy_install, followed by the Trac requirements:

$ easy_install Pygments
$ easy_install Genshi
$ easy_install Trac
$ easy_install sqlite
$ apt-get install libapache-mod-python
$ apt-get install python-pysqlite2
$ cd ~
$ mkdir trac/myprojectname
$ trac-admin trac/myprojectname initenv

(enter the details you need or just keep hitting to accept the defaults - it’s all configurable later)

Type the tracd line given to you at the end of the install and make sure it runs (probably need your IP at this point because it won’t bind to a hostname).

Add this inside your VirtualHost:

<Location /wherever/you/like>
  SetHandler python-program
  PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
  PythonOption TracEnv /absolute/path/trac/myprojectname
  PythonOption TracUriRoot /wherever/you/like
  PythonDebug On
</Location>

Patch /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Trac-0.11b2-py2.4.egg/trac/web/modpython_frontend.py with code from http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracModPython2.7 (yes, it’s all needed) - the “Known Issues” at the end of the code apply, most notably “There may be a character set issue” - for me this manifested itself in the <title> element of the page with a “–” separating my project name from the word “Trac” rather than a long hypen.