Professor Bebo White was one of the speakers at the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) tutorial that took place this week at the WWW Conference here in Banff. I found his talk on Web 2.0 very informative, so I thought I’d share my notes from the talk. I’ll add links to official resources to the bottom of this article.

What Web 2.0 Isn’t

Bebo started by telling the audience that if they could define Web 2.0, they knew more than him. I think he was being a bit facetious, because he proceeded to elaborate on a pretty good definition. He started out with a description of what Web 2.0 isn’t:
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This article, like all of the ones in the System Administration Category, is for system administrators. It is about setting up a kick-butt version control system for web development, using Subversion.

After a brief overview of the Subversion Book, I thought that given a couple of hours, I’d be able to set up a subversion repository on my development server, and access it using WebDAV. Over SSL. Authenticated to my LDAP server. With auto-commits and automatic updates to the working dir (which is a website). I was totally wrong about the couple of hours part.

Four days later, I’ve learned a lot about Subversion and WebDAV, and a bit more about Apache 2. This article summarizes what I learned; I hope that it saves you some time!

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I recently setup the so-called “MAMP” (MacOSX, Apache2, MySQL and PHP) on my laptop, so I can have a portable web development environment. I decided to use MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) for Apache2 and PHP5, which makes things a lot easier. There were a few “gotchas” though, so I thought I’d share what I learned. If you want an installation completely based on MacPorts builds, this site has some good instructions.

I went with the binary installation package from MySQL.com, instead of using the MacPorts version, for aesthetic reasons: it comes with a cool preference panel component for starting and stopping the server (click the thumbnail to the right for a larger image). Using this version instead does require a slight tweak to get the MacPorts packages to link to it, but its easy to do.

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