Viridia.org

I just started working with Mercurial, a new distributed SCM system and I have to say that I am quite impressed. Mercurial is a direct competitor to GNU Arch, Darcs, BitKeeper, Monotone, and other open-source distributed SCMs, however it seems very well architected and polished.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that you not only run it as a command-line utility, but you can run the same program a web server, allowing you to distribute your files over a network; You can also configure it to run as a .cgi script, so that if you have a larger web site, you can incorporate a Mercurial repository within it fairly easily.

The code was pretty easy to set up and use. Within less than an hour, I was able to:

• Compile and install the package on my laptop.
• Create an initial repository.
• Check in an example file.
• Compile and install Mercurial on the remote host I use for viridia.org.
• Propagate the changes from my laptop to the server.
• set up Mercurial to function as a .cgi script.
• write a .htaccess file to tell Apache to use it.

You can see the result here.

You might have noticed the small banner ad in the right hand-column. This is a little bit of Javascript that links to Amnesty International’s Irrepressible campaign home page.

The general idea is to support efforts against Internet censorship by spreading politically censored content as widely as possible, making it impossible to block. I had a similar idea a while back about creating a “poison pill” that would force the Chinese government to block large numbers of web sites, thus making the “great firewall” a self-imposed denial of service attack.

So I finally managed to get the database migrated over from the old host – as you can see, the old articles are here now. I was able to migrate all the user comments as well.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to migrate the actual user accounts, because the table format changed too much from that version of WordPress to the version being used here. So you’ll need to recreate your account info if you had an account here before.

I am still working on migrating the themes, static pages, photos, etc.