Ever since I’ve started experimenting with HyperDB I thought that once I’ve got enough servers at my disposal, and if I ever figure out how to setup MySQL replication I’d bring the two together. I believe that day has finally come: HyperDB is now deployed across over 60 sites I’m taking care of.

I want to share with you my configuration and some of the pitfalls I’ve come across – if it helps, great. But mainly these notes are for me to remember how I did it when the next cluster needs to be built.

My Setup

Currently I’m hosting sites with one main server running CentOS 6 and Plesk 10.4 – that’s for web and email. On another server I’m hosting my databases. This server is also running Plesk which makes replication a little bit more difficult.

I want to build a “cluster” of 4 database servers in total, two masters which replicate each other and can be used for read and write queries, and two slaves which replicate one master each. These are for read queries. Thanks to HyperDB I can decide whether I want to use my masters for write only and leave the read queries to my slaves. I could even expand on those slaves later if I wanted to.

I have considered circular multi-master replication, but that’ just giving me a headache. Imagine one going down, then all of them are out of sync. It’s got MESSY written all over. If I need more masters later, I’d rather build another cluster altogether.

 At the time of writing I’m dealing with WordPress 3.3.1 and HyperDB 1.1. MySQL on my system is at version 5.1 for the masters and 5.5 for the slaves. I know this sounds dangerous, and 5.5 has some additional configuration options in my.cnf, as well as an additional database (performance_schema). But testing shows that these replicate well despite the different versions.

Before we begin

HyperDB is great, but it DOES NOT replicate your servers for you. You need to do this yourself. Once replication is in place, HyperDB will work its magic – but it won’t build a cluster for you.

First we need to setup two multi-masters, so two servers need to replicate onto each other. I’ve written how to do this in another article. Once that’s done we need to introduce one slave to Master 1, so technically Master 1 replicates onto two machines. Master 2 will currently only replicate onto Master 1 because we’ll re-introduce our current standalone database server as Slave 2. More about that later.

To test if this is working, I like having 4 SSH windows open at a time. Three of them are logged into my database servers, and one of them is an ad-hoc. This is what it looks like:

You can never have enough SSH Terminals open. I use the standard Mac Terminal app for this

I like creating a database on one of the servers and check the other ones to make sure it’s been replicated properly. You do this with three easy MySQL commands:

create database aaa;
show databases;
drop database aaa;

These create, show all and delete database “aaa”. In an ideal world, you can create on Master 1, it should show up on both Master 2 and Slave 1. You should also be able to delete the same database from Master 2 and it should vanish from Master 1 and Slave 1.

Beware: if only ONE mistake happens, the replication on the problematic server will immediately stop replication until you fix the issue. By “mistake” I mean that if you’re dropping a database that the slave doesn’t know for example, or changing a value which does not exist. The only remedy in such cases is to stop the slave, pointing it to the synced master log position and then starting it again.

While you’re testing you should also emulate what happens when a server goes down. So switch Master 1 off by using the following shell command:

service mysqld stop

Then create a database on Master 2 and switch Master 1 back on via

service mysqld start

In an ideal world Master 1 should show your database. Slave 1 on the other hand may need another minute to catch up – depending on how often you’ve told him to reconnect to the master. Mine is set to re-connect once every minute, so grab a coffee and check again. Do it the other way round too so you’re absolutely certain that things replicate even when a server can’t be reached.

Great News: I’ve been meaning to add a general WordPress forum to this site for a while, but none of the options seemed to work well for what I wanted to do.

All I needed was a simple discussion forum, integrated into WordPress – I really didn’t want to mess around with phpBB or the likes. bbPress is in a constant state of beta and gives me a headache every time I want to make it work, SimplePress is ugly and basically all of the above are overcomplicated.

Enter Tal.ki – an embeddable forum solution that promises to give me a forum with only one line of code, or alternatively as a WordPress Plugin! It’s not live on this site – let’s test it out!

What is Tal.ki?

First of all, Tal.ki is a hosted forum solution so you won’t have to install anything on your site. It can work as a standalone website, or be integrated into an existing website (such as WordPress). The beauty is that all kinds of integration nightmares a la bbPress are necessary. Just activate the Tal.ki plugin (or embed the code they give you into any page or post) and you’ve got yourself a forum.

Tal.ki accepts plenty of login options so there’s no need to authenticate your members: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, OpenID, Yahoo, Google or even your own self-hosted WordPress site will be enough to recognise who’s posting. And that’s not a full list of login options either!

Since Tal.ki is a hosted forum, you can embed the same forum on more than one website if you’re using standalone code (this won’t work with the WordPress plugin as that’s tied to the website it’s activated on). In my case that’s a superb idea as I have more than one site dedicated to the same topic: wpguru.co.uk and wphosting.tv – but both audiences would benefit from the same topics.

My servers are very happy about not having to take extra load either, which makes Tal.ki such a lightweight option to add to any website. At the same time, Tal.ki is clever enough to read the existing stylesheet of your Theme and use the same fonts and colours so it looks like it’s part of our site. Now THAT’S clever!

Features

There are two versions available: one is completely free, the other one is only $50 per year. The main difference is that the free version only displays 15 topics and 5 sub forums on display. The Pro version adds a search option as well as image uploads (yes IMAGE UPLOADS) to the mix, as well as posts only visible to logged in members.

There appears to be a level above this but I’m not sure how one would sign up for it or how much it costs – I am interested though, if anyone has information about the Platinum package please let me know!

As with other comment systems you get notified via email when someone replies to your topic – however there’s a snag to this with Tal.ki: the link you’re sent takes you to the standalone forum rather than the embedded version on your website… not good! NO sidebar, no branding, no context. But then, maybe it’s me not having configured it properly.

Tal.ki embedded on this site

Testing Testing

At this stage I’d like to test how well it could work for me – so please start posting in the forum, lets see how this can work. I’m using the Pro version.

Any comments – below or in the forum – would be much appreciated.

I was working on a secure site with sensitive video material that we needed strict members access to. Even though many plugins can make sure your direct permalinks can only be seen by logged in members, direct links to files in your wp-content directory are still accessible to others. They can even be hotlinked from other sites.

One way around this is to move the wp-content directory outside the web visible portion of your directory on the server, but even so WordPress can always link to such files. A better way is to tell your server not to give access to certain files (say ending with mp4 or mp3) and only allow such access from your own domain.

We can use Apache Mod Rewrite for this – it’s a complex language that you can utilise in your .htaccess file within the wp-content folder.

Let me show you how to keep prying eyes out of your content.

The Problem

Say you had a PDF file that you’d like visitors on your own site to download.

However, if someone were to copy this link and call it from a browser window directly, or if they were to post the direct link to this PDF on their website they will NOT be able to download the document.

The Solution

Upload a .htaccess file into your wp-content folder. Have a look if one exists already, then append this code to the end of the file. If you don’t have one, just create a new blank file and add this code to it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourwebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !hotlink\.(gif|png|jpg|doc|xls|pdf|html|htm|xlsx|docx|mp4|mov) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*wordpress_logged_in.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|png|jpg|doc|xls|pdf|html|htm|xlsx|docx|mp4|mov)$ http://yourwebsite.com/ [NC]

This rather strange sounding code is neither Linux nor PHP nor MySQL – it’s Apache (that’s the service which usually takes care of serving up those websites from a server). These are instructions that will instruct Apache do the following – I’ll explain this line by line:

• here are some instructions I’d like you to use in this directory
• IF someone comes from anywhere other than yourwebsite.com
• AND they ask for a direct file that ends with any of the following (gif, png, jpg, etc)
• AND they are not logged into WordPress on this domain
• THEN direct every link to such files to http://yourwebsite.com

If these conditions are not met, then give out the file – everyone’s happy.

Why do I need this?

To prevent people hotlinking to your files. One aspect is security: say you have sensitive material that you want only your visitors to see. Or imagine you had a members area and give out a PDF that you’d like them to see without an encrypted link when only they’re logged in.

Same for image or videos hosted on your site, that you’d like to embed into your own pages alone and nowhere else. I had a guy once link one of my images as his background to his MySpace page. He had tons of hits, and every time someone visited his MySpace profile, the background graphic came from my server. If you’re on a plan with bandwidth limitations this can get you into trouble.

I want this functionality, but this all sounds Chinese. Can you help me?

Certainly! Book a half hour support slot here or over at WP Hosting and I’ll get this setup for you in no time.

Further Reading

These articles discuss the same subject:

• http://top-frog.com/2010/07/01/a-simple-way-to-limit-file-downloads-to-only-logged-in-users-in-wordpress
• http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/35226/the-best-way-to-protect-uploaded-media-in-wordpress
• http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-protect-media-library-uploads-folder-within-a-membership-site

The path to PHP is

/usr/bin/php

This is good to know if you need to setup a cron job which triggers a PHP file. Calling it from a web browser directly is not a problem, but if you have to call it from the command line or as a scheduled task you need to call it with

/usr/bin/php yourfile.php

You can also use wget or cURL but that’s often not reliable.

If your PHP file gives you an output (usually to the browser screen), your server will send you an email. If you;d rather this didn’t happen, direct it to nowhere like so:

/usr/bin/php yourfile.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Dr. Web is a Russian anti-virus utility that comes bundles with Plesk. It’s good and it tries to keep the bad guys out.

To keep up with all the mutations out there it tries to update itself frequently but usually doesn’t succeed because the Dr. Web server is busy or down or somehow now working as it should be. Sadly this means that every time something goes wrong I get an email once every hour… imagine what this means when you have 11 servers to look after: an overflowing inbox.

Here’s the solution: tweak a system file and divert those emails to nowhere:

Have a look at either

/etc/cron.daily/drweb-update

or if that file doesn’t exist on your system take a look at

/etc/cron.d/drweb-update

The content of this file should only be one line which calls the actual update routine in crontab format:

#cat drweb-update

*/30 * * * * drweb /opt/drweb/update.pl

Now take out your favourite text editor and amend it to

*/30 * * * * drweb /opt/drweb/update.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

Case closed. No need to reboot your server either.

Special thanks to Igor and igraf on this Parallels Forum Thread.

After well over a year I am very pleased to share with you our latest business venture:

WP Hosting – the easiest way to get a self-hosted WordPress site.

WP Hosting has been in the making for quite some time, and what better way to make its launch coincide with the release of WordPress 3.3. With it come some fundamental changes to the way we do things here – let me explain the details.

I’ve been offering Hosting with WordPress pre-installed for nearly two years and I’d like to make this available to more customers. This site doesn’t really lend itself to do so, and a complete overhaul would have been too disruptive – hence WP Hosting was born.

The new site will offer the same service that you’ve come to love and much more – check out all the features here.

With the change, Julia will be joining me full time on this project. We’ve got plenty of ideas in the pipeline such as

• an affiliate programme
• dedicated servers for WordPress
• larger choice hosting packages
• members support forum
• workshops to help you get the most out of WordPress

The WP Guru will then be able to return to what it once was – i..e my personal notebook of all things WordPress, code hacking, Linux and all the other stuff I like to write about, including plugin development. I feel this is too much for casual users as it can get a bit hard core at times (even for me you know).

You can of course still get support from me on this site as well as at WP Hosting, but WP Hosting will be more about how to use WordPress and sell hosting.

We’ve also got a new newsletter system: previously three different fragmented systems have been migrated into MailChimp – it’ll make our lives much easier too. We’re leaving the Facebook page as it is and will feed it with posts from WP Hosting and we’ve created a new dedicated Twitter account @wphostingtv for the same updates.

But that’s not all. We’ve also upgraded our server farm to a whopping 8 servers now – that’s more than I had ever thought I’d operate! The latest additions feature 16GB of RAM and hexacore AMD processors to keep things smooth with the added traffic we’re all raking in.

We’ve got a lot more work to do, starting with some seamless site migrations in the twilight hours tonight. You shouldn’t notice a thing, but if you do – please let us know.

Thank you for your continued support over the last two years. Have a lovely Christmas!

I’ve recently added two more servers to my ever growing network at WP Hosting. To prevent an attack by those scumbags from Hacker Land, I’ve been relying on the amazing OSSEC Host Intrusion Detection System.

Even though the OSSEC website is great, I always forget the simple steps that are involved in getting it up and running on a brand new server. Here are the steps that work for me.

At the time of writing, OSSEC HIDS is at version 2.6 – these instructions may be outdated by the time you read this. Please bear that in mind. Thanks

Prep Work

To get OSSEC working, we’ll need a couple of tools installed: the GCC compiler and the MAKE command. Let’s install those first:

yum install gcc

yum install make

Excellent! This should mean OSSEC will install without hiccups.

Install OSSEC

Next let’s get OSSEC onto the local machine. Let’s download it – perhaps into a temp directory of your choice:

wget http://www.ossec.net/files/ossec-hids-latest.tar.gz

Now let’s unTAR it using this command:

tar -zxvf ossec*

Change into the OSSEC directory using cd ossec* and run

./install.sh

Configuration and Setup

All we need to do now is decide whether OSSEC runs as the main analysis server (server), an agent that’s being analysed by the server (agent) or if this is a standalone system not attached to a bigger network (local). Note that the server also analyses its own logs as well as the agent’s logs.

The default values are the ones you want to use so just hit enter several times. Have the server’s IP address handy when you’re installing new agents.

Setting up your Agents

You’ll have to tell your Server about new Agents. Run the following command on your Server to do this  – have your Agent’s IP addresses ready:

/var/ossec/bin/manage_agents

Servers are also known as “Managers” nowadays, I still call them Servers as that’s the way I’ve learnt it back in the days. Select the (A)dd Agent option, give each a catchy name and enter their IP address. Do this for every Agent you have.

Next extract the key for each agent and add them to the relevant agent by running the above command. To do this, have two terminal windows open – one for the Server and one for the Agent.

Once done, make sure the OSSEC demon is restarted using

service ossec restart

Check if the Server can talk to the Agents

Let’s check if all the hard work is paying off by checking the logs:

tail -50 /var/ossec/logs/ossec.log

Pay close attention to the ossec.conf file by checking it here:

vi /var/ossec/etc/ossec.conf

Note that for security it is read only by default (chmod 400) and OSSEC will give you a warning if you leave it writable for longer that you need to.

Troubleshooting and FAQs

If the OSSEC Server can’t communicate with the Agents, chances are that the a receiving firewall is blocking incoming traffic on UDP port 1514. Open it up in both directions so the two can communicate.

Here’s a handy guide on how to fix duplicate errors should this ever be a problem. Also pay close attention to the Server IP address in the ossec.conf file. For some reason mine were pointing to an older server even though I asked OSSEC fr a clean install rather than an upgrade.

Other than that there’s the fabulous OSSEC Website for more tips and tricks – plus the best piece of documentation that every been written and dubbed The OSSEC Bible, both for Kindle as well as in print.

The other day I got myself a brand new server – so barebones that I had to do everything myself, including picking a Linux distribution. Sadly the one I wanted (CentOS 6) did not come bundled with Plesk so I had to install it manually.

I thought I’d better take some notes so I can retrace my steps.

At the time of writing, Plesk 10.3 is current, with 10.4 just around the corner. Keep this in mind – things tend to change drastically with every major release.

Documentation

Let’s get started by remembering where all Plesk documentation is kept, i.e. at the Parallels Site:

http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/plesk/documentation/

Installation

Let’s install Plesk not via the Autoinstaller but instead use the super useful tool called the One Click Installer. Instead of downloading a package and then installing it to get the ball rolling, One Click determines your OS and does the whole shebang in one fair swoop.

Here’s how to use it:

wget -O - http://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer | sh

Works a treat! You may have to yum install wget before you can use this command.

Should this method fail you can download the first file yourself and follow the steps in this article.

Add Atomic Repo Power

YUM is already installed by default on CentOS 6 – but to make it even better we can add the Atomic Turtle Repo to it. How do we do this? Like so:

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh | sh

This step is optional but highly recommended. Make sure you do this AFTER you’ve installed Plesk, otherwise the installer will get confused due to differences in repositories.

How to Log In for the first time

Now Plesk is ready to rock under https://yourdomain.com:8443

Your credentials are the same as your root login for the server. Disregard the certificate warning. Once you’ve filled out all the relevant contact and config options you’ll be able to login with “admin” and that password you’ve chosen.

Parallels Panel Server Monitoring App

You may have heard of an iPhone / Android / Blackberry App that will connect with Plesk and keep you posted on the health of your server. Unfortunately that’s not quite been released yet but will be when Plesk 10.4 hits the virtual shelves.

Maybe we’ll get a Christmas present?

Uninstalling Plesk

Done with Plesk? Did something go wrong and you want to start again? This article explains which directories to delete:

http://www.ehow.com/how_8608908_remove-plesk.html

Further Reading (and hacking)

The guys at GraFX have compiled a very comprehensive guide on how to get started and how to secure your server once it’s up and running. Thanks guys – much appreciated! Go check it out here:

www.grafxsoftware.com/faq.php/HOW-TO-Setup-a-PLESK-Dedicated-Server/1/4/

If you don’t want to do all those steps yourself GraFX are happy to give you a hand for a very reasonable $50. Do check it out, it contains a huge host of information.

I’ve written this in response to a question on The 30 Day Challenge, in which I will be answering web related question throughout October. The question was “what exactly is a blog” in particular as a possible starting point to write a book – I hope you find this useful

Blogging is an awful term I find, and it really doesn’t explain very well what it actually is and how useful it can be to oneself. Let me see if I can explain this.

The word blog is short for weblog and has started as an online journal many years ago. All you could do was write up a diary entries and share them with the world. Many people still do it just for that, but of course you can share any writing / picture / video combination nowadays.

What made blogging popular was the addition of a comment field at the bottom, so other people could interact with your particular entry. Say one day you’ve visited The Alamo in Texas and write about it, then the next day someone leaves a comment and adds some information to your post in the form of a comment. Now it’s a mini-discussion which is even more interesting for other people to read. This interaction has replaced many traditional forums which were often all discussion without an article. You as the author have control over those comments so you can delete them, amend them or answer them (this is called moderation).

Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with your audience, but the tools to write blogs are now so powerful that they have largely replaced static websites. Even if you’re not blogging you can use the same tools (like WordPress) to generate a page that doesn’t change much – but when you want to make a change, it’s very easy to reword a passage on a page or add a picture for example.

Blogging Platforms are also known as Content Management Systems, and your content would be those blog entries. But you’re in no way restricted to using it as a personal diary of course. It’s useful for anything that you add to – like writing a book from start to finish. You can always amend what you write later, but it may give you valuable insight into a following audience. They may for example comment that they don’t follow the storyline, which is great information for any author to have. Or they tell you they can’t wait to read your next installment.

If you’re not interested in audience participation then you can switch off the comments feature altogether, or only open it on some of your posts.

Think of blog entires are your “content” – which can and should be organised. For example, a post can have several tags. If we stick to the above example of you visiting The Alamo, tags could be “alamo, texas, us, travelling, monument” and many more. If you continue your journey around the world and write about the Grand Canyon next, you might tag this next post with “colorado, us, nature”. So far so good.

Tags come in handy if you later find that you’ve written hundreds of posts, but now you (or a visitor) want to look only at posts regarding the US. Hey presto – both your Alamo and Grand Canyon posts will come up because you’ve tagged them both with “us”. Therefore finding things in your content written over a period of time becomes very easy.

Going back to your book example, if you write about a certain character, you can then find every scene you tagged with your character and maybe edit the final version of the book. That’s useful if you don’t write in he order of the final book.

Another way to organise your content is into Categories. These work slightly different to tags because categories can also have sub categories. Each post can have both tags as well as categories. The difference will become clear again when you search for particular content.

Imagine you write about cars as well as recipes, then you don’t want any car entries intermingled with your recipes. You would have a link on your blog to display all car entries, and another one to display all recipe entries. So far so good.

Now imagine that you’d like to bring some more order to the recipes you write about: you could have sub-categories like Chinese, Indian and French recipes. Still those links on the front page display them all, but you could have another link that only goes to French Recipes, and nothing else would be displayed. Same with cars – you could have Ford, Vauxhall and Citroen. Again finding content you add over time will become easier for yourself and your readers to find.

I hope this introduction was useful and not too detailed. I’ve never explained a blog in detail, but I think this may be useful for other readers too. I think this email to you will become my new blog post

If you have any further question about how to start a blog, please let me know.

Enjoy the 30 Day Challenge

JAY

There are so many content management systems (or blogging platforms) on the market, many of them offer a free service. Some of them that spring to mind are these:

• Blogger (by Google)
• WordPress
• Live Spaces (by Microsoft, now defunct)
• Movable Type
• Type Pad
• Joomla
• Drupal

The choice is endless and the list could go on – but only two are serious candidates, at least for me. This comes down to personal preference and I encourage you to try them all… but who has the time to do that?

Let me explain the differences.

WordPress

Before we begin: I’m a WordPress fan myself – excuse me for being biased. It’s the platform with by far the most users compared to the competition, and there’s a reason for it. It’s Open Source, it’s in active development and according to the latest survey 20% of all new .com domains registered are being installed with WordPress.

According to Alexa.com, WordPress is used by nearly 15% of the top 1 million websites in existence – so you’re in good company!

WordPress has a self-hosted version as well as a free hosted version you can use. Have a look at this article where I explain the differences between those two versions.

WordPress can be used for blogging as well as serious web site building: it’s streamlined backend interface is the same no matter how your site looks for visitors. Therefore you only need to learn one interface and feel right at home with every WordPress site you run. Believe me, since creating a website has become easy, you’ll think of many ideas that could do with good websites.

You can choose from thousands of layouts, you can have web designers create one for you, you can add advertising, a shopping cart, automate posting – in fact the sky’s the limit with WordPress. I say go with that.

Blogger

I’ve been with Blogger back in 2006 when I wanted to add a blog to my existing static website. It was ugly – but I guess you have to start somewhere.

Blogger is a free Google owned service which has you up and running in no time. The advantage with Blogger is it’s super easy setup and interface, its connection with many other Google services. It’s very easy to activate advertising via Google Adsense on your blog. It also features Google Images and YouTube integration.

You can choose from several layouts and start writing straight away, but customisation options are very limited. You can spot a Blogger blog a mile off. It’s only meant to be a journal rather than a website: one of the major differences between Blogger and WordPress is that the latter allows you to create static sites as well as blog posts. Blogger doesn’t do that – all you’ll every write is a time-stamped post which is displayed as such.

You cannot create a shopping cart with Blogger, but you can use it to jot down your thoughts or accompany a project you’re working on. WordPress wins in my opinion due to the extra functionality you’d gain.

Blogger is soon to be changed to Google Blogs and is as of June 2010 hosted on Google’s servers.

And then there’s The Rest

Before blogs became commonplace on the web there were many services on the web – one of them was Live Spaces which was Microsoft’s blogging platform. It’s been shutdown in 2011 and all users have been offered a free integration into WordPress.com.

Joomla and Drupal are endeavours just like WordPress, albeit with much less success and a smaller developer community.  They both feature static pages and the ability to add functionality to your site via plugins and both support layouts. I’ve looked at both and found the backend to be ugly and tedious to understand. I gave up very quickly (and I’m a techie).

Movable Type and Type Pad are somewhere in between the others. Type Pad is used by large corporations to host internal blogs, and Movable type used to charge people a fee for using their service. I know of their existence but must admit I’ve never had a reason to look further than WordPress.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a blogging tool, you should use what works best for you. It’s difficult for me to tell you what that is. I’d say try the above tools out yourself and see what you think.

I’d always recommend WordPress over the rest, but that’s maybe because it works for me and 50 million other people. You’ll get huge free support and a vast amount of content to make it your own.

Whichever solution you go with – have fun using it. If it becomes a headache or distracts you from what you want to use it for, look elsewhere.

Slightly off topic – but just so that I don’t forget:

• Find the -info.plist file (in the Supporting Files folder). Say your app is called MyApp, then you’re looking for a file called MyApp-info.plist
• Say hello to a meaningless list of code
• In here, find the Bundle Display Name
• Change it from the default ${PRODUCT_NAME} to your title
• Build and see your title underneath your logo

I’ve just released Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 – the exact same version as 2.0, however this time it includes all the files it actually needs…

Let me explain what happened earlier:

So there I was, having tested the latest version of Snapshot Backup 2.0 for several weeks, all is well at my end, and I decided to release it to the public. After over 11.000 downloads it gets the long awaited automation feature, revamped menu structure and gets its own branding. How exciting! You should all finally have it, it’s been a long wait.

I uploaded the changes using Subversion, and thanks to Tortoise SVN I can do this with a right click from my Windows 7 machine. It’s all so much easier than hacking away on my development server via SSH. Ever so pleased I decided to treat myself with a Mac Book at the Apple Store in Covent Garden – let the iOS Development begin!

Shortly after I had arrived in town all your kind comments kept flooding in: some files were missing in 2.0 which Tortoise SVN didn’t import properly, and hence 2.0 was only 80% of what it should have been (read: 100% unusable).

Thank you to everyone who broght this to my attention, I’m really sorry I couldn’t rectify this before tonight when I got back home.

I really like Subversion for what it does – but I absolutely hate the way it does it. Can’t it be easy, even intuitive perhaps? Why must it be so difficult for developers to get good software into the hands of good people and make the world a better place? Rather than make a very easy thing super uber mega complicated? How about an option that says “add all new files, sync them, then tag to latest version” in one mouse click? Maybe I’ll write a plugin for this.

Of course it’s all me not having explicitely added all the new files that my new version needs – and I do appreciate Subversion as a project of course. And I don’t mean to be mean. Anyway, rant over.

Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 is live, let’s forgive and forget and try again from scratch.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:

Thanks to Robin and Anjaan for letting me know about an error message that displayed in my header function – I’ve just released 2.0.2 to alleviate this problem.