StrivingLife presents ...

Since I can't fall asleep, and since experience has taught me that it's best to write when I've got things running through my head ...

Why I went to college

You go to college once you're done with high school - unless you're going straight into the workforce.

At the time I was working at a Culvers, which I enjoyed because of a number of people that I worked with, but I knew that I couldn't make that my profession. There were people that were working there that I just didn't want to become.

So, I looked at colleges and settled on the University of Wisconsin: Green Bay since I couldn't go to Madison, didn't want to go to MATC (I saw tech schools as 'lower than' four year colleges, even though my mom went back to school through a tech school, which helped move us out of lower class into the middle class).

Anyways, I figured it would be temporary as I'd switch over to the UW (Madison).

Originally I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was interested in psychology (thanks to a high school teacher - Mr. Frank) and math.

My first couple years of college I walked down that path, but biology classes killed me, and I had difficulty understanding my math and physics professors.

I took an introductory course in philosophy, which I ended up not going to quite a bit, but for whatever reason I took a social and political philosophy course my second semester of my sophmore year.

The professor I had for that philosophy course, Dr. Fiala, was young and pretty dang cool. He rather effectively got me interested in philosophy. Another professor got me interested in history (id est, humanistic studies). Since I was required to declare a major and minor ... philosophy and humanistic studies. At that point I still thought I'd switch over to psychology as time went by.

However, my mom wasn't sufficiently swayed when I told her that - she didn't think I listened enough. (Anyone who's known me at some point in the last four years would find that hard to believe.) (Thinking on it further, I've been an introvert since 7th grade, which isn't news to me, and which is perfectly explainable.)

Anyways, I ended up sticking with philosophy, for lack of anything else, and because, especially in my last 2 semesters (I ended up going for 9) I was really into philosophy. This was in part because it was a smaller group that was taking the classes, so I felt more comfortable, I had gained a relationship with most of my professors, and those who intimated me (and probably the rest) in philosophy courses had graduated.

When I finally graduated in December '03, I was sad to leave, and was very tempted to stay on for another semester. But ... I didn't, mostly because I was getting sick of having horrible roommates.

I should note that I had a pretty good one, using hindsight, my Freshman and first half of my Sophmore year. He definitely shaped me. The first part of my Junior year introduced another good one, but from then on, with the exception of one summer, it was pretty much down hill.

The students that I worked with also made leaving hard.

But, leave I did.

What I did when I got out

I was able to take off a couple of months when I got back, before I started looking for work. I thought about going back to Culvers, for the money, and since I was making a good wage when I'd left. I thought about Borders and applying at the Barnes & Nobles that they were putting up (in East Town mall). Finally it was temp work.

My first job was ... interesting. It was supposed to be two days, but ended up stretching into three. Then they wanted me to come back the following week. Luckily, before then, I was asked if I wanted to do another job, involving Web work.

Probably in high school I first was introduced to Web site creation. My first sites were pretty horrid (and still exist under old aliases that I used for a very short time), but I learned basic HTML skills. I grew in my knowledge, but it was completely self-learned. (Fun fact: AOL had some Web tutorials that were probably the first that I had ever read on the subject.)

I had thought about taking courses during college, but it was relatively hard to get into them if you didn't have it as your major. In hind-sight, I'm glad that I didn't, as I shudder to think what I would have 'learned.' (Not that it would necessarily have been bad, but I think my personal interests were better guidance than some one else's during my early development.)

Back to temp work, I gratefully took the second temp job.

Originally it was only supposed to be for a couple of months, and I was picked up with one other person. However, the time frame kept changing, sometimes leading to a bit of stress on when we'd be back looking for jobs. She, the other temp, got a 'real' job, so another, and then another, were hired.

Eventually a new position was created, and it was recommended that I apply, which I did, and which lead to my employment.

Not wanting to talk any further on the issue, I'll cease my writing here, and try to fall asleep.

I don't know if this is a suggestion, or if the information is already available.

I'd really like to be able to see a complete listing of movies that I've rated.

A complete listing of movies I've rated and that are in my queue is buried in the privacy tab, and I can page through movies that I've rated, but there's no way to get all the movies I've rated on one page.

Or is there?

(What I'd really like to do, and what I'm sure others would like to do, is be able to list these on my site; here's the movies I've rated at Netflix. This helps me and Netflix, I'd think.)

Last time, I played around with Subversion in order to determine just how Subversion worked.

This time I'm actually going to create a repository for a site to store the current version, and work through making a couple of updates.

Existing site structure

The site that I'll be working with is DoNotDenyMyUnicorn.com. It's a small, stable, site, that has just a few files. It's also relatively clean, with no previous versions floating about.

The directory for the site currently exists on another box, at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\donotdenymyunicorn\ and consists of 8 files in that directory.

1. index.html
2. main234x60.gif
3. print.css
4. robots.txt
5. screen.css
6. sitemap.xml
7. StrivingLifeGmail.png
8. (a Google-related file)

The new development structure

I won't be changing the structure of the site, but since I'll be moving the files to my Vista box, I'll have a slightly different structure.

First, I'll be storing the repository at B:\repos\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn\

The development files will be stored at B:\projects\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn\

My workflow

Since I'm the only one working on my sites, I'll be keeping things simple. I'll do all my development work in B:\projects\ and push files once they've been tested and commited to the repository.

Depending upon what issues I run into, this may change, but this is what I'm planning for now.

Creating the repository

The first thing to do is create the repository we'll be using. The location of the repository will be B:\repos\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn\ , so the first thing to do is make sure that the directory exists. In my case, I need to create the DoNotDenyMyUnicorn folder.

With that done, I can right-click on the DoNotDenyMyUnicorn folder and select TortoiseSVN > Create repository here... (type of Native filesystem, of course).

Creating the working/development directory

Now that I've got the repository created, it's time to put data into it.

As I said before, the development directory will be at B:\projects\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn\ .

Now I have a couple of options. I can either import my existing content into Subversion, or I can create a working copy, add my data, and commit it.

In this case I'm going to create a working copy, since that makes more sense to me.

So, I right-click on the DoNotDenyMyUnicorn directory in B:\repos\ and select SVN Checkout...

I'll confirm that the URL is correct (file:///B:/repos/DoNotDenyMyUnicorn) and browse to the Checkout directory of B:\projects\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn .

Pressing OK, I've now got revision 0 in my projects directory.

Next I'll grab the eight files from my XP machine, and copy them into B:\projects\DoNotDenyMyUnicorn\ .

I can now either 'Add...' each of the files I want under version control, or just right-click in/on the DoNotDenyMyUnicorn directory to select SVN Commit...

Depending upon whether I already added the files, I may need to select the files I want added, but since I want them all, a simple check of "Select / deselect all" selects the eight files.

I'll type a meaningful message ("Initial check-in.") and press OK.

This should add the 8 files, and create revision 1.

Making changes

Now there's just a few minor things that I want to change about the existing DoNotDenyMyUnicorn. I used Visual Studio 2008, but the editor doesn't really matter.

Once I've made my changes, I'll need to commit them to the repository.

This is as simple as either committing the changes by selecting, or by committing the entire project directory (DoNotDenyMyUnicorn, in B:\projects\) and letting SVN take care of the rest.

In my case I just had the one change.

Once I committed, I pushed the changed files up to my remote Windows server.

While doing so, I noticed that I had a favicon, that I didn't have on my devel site. Whoops.

It was easy enough to download that into my project directory, and add/commit that to the repository.

Conclusions

While this doesn't handle trunks, branches, tags, or any of that other fun stuff, for a simple Web site, as DoNotDenyMyUnicorn.com is, it's easy enough to move files into version control - much easier than I originally thought.

However, while we didn't talk about it, it's a very good idea to make sure that you have clean directories, without temp files, previous versions, and 'correct' directories. You can always exclude these from versioning, but a clean directory is a developer's favorite directory.

Next steps

My next steps are to move more of my sites into version control. Your next step should be to move one of your smaller sites, or test Subversion out.