We experienced an unexpected downtime this afternoon - roughly from 16:00 CET to 17:00 CET. The error occured when a new planned link was configured by our ISP before it was planned to be physically connected, making it impossible to reach our network.

After locating the error we also then connected the new fiber-based line. With the recent server upgrade and this new fiber-based Internet connection, the site should now have very good performance.

Sorry for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.

We will be upgrading our server infrastructure on Friday night, and this will likely involve some downtime as we migrate. The window for making the changes is Friday Oct 10th 21:00 CET to Saturday Oct 11th 06:00, so during this time the services may not always be available. Naturally we will try to keep the actual downtime to a minimum.

Update: The upgrade is completed and everything should be working normally. The site was offline for approx. 25 minutes during the upgrade time window. Hopefully you will all notice that the site is much more responsive now, and please contact us if you experience any problems.

The CodeResort API is based on the  http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/XmlRpcPlugin with some custom extensions. We have now taken over maintenance of this open source plugin, and have recently put a lot of effort into upgrading and improving it.

Today we have launched the updated API, and among other things it includes a new JSON-RPC interface in addition to the XML-RPC interface we've had for quite some time.

A simple illustration of what that the JSON-RPC interface looks like:

1. Make a POST request to https://www.coderesort.com/p/<projectname>/login/jsonrpc with header Content-Type set to application/json and a request body like:

   {"method": "wiki.getPage", "params": ["WikiStart"]}
   

2. Parse and use the response:

   {"id": 123, "error": null, "result": "= Welcome to....
   

There are clients that work with the API, like Eclipse Mylyn and some of our own tools we have made available. Further, the API can of course be used for any custom integration with your own information systems - for instance as an interface with a customer support system, or with internal reminder, scheduling, or publishing tools.

See the api project for all the details on how to get started.

Lots of exciting possibilities!

A project at CodeResort is a container for source, documentation, tickets, news and more. Our intention is being able to capture and track history for all formal and informal aspects of project progress.

With the addition of 'Talk' for all projects, there is now also a way for interactive group chats in projects. This new feature can be used for many cool things:

• Do online project meetings. No travel needed. No typing of minutes with the full transcript always being available.
• Make a Talk for general project chat, and have the project members 'hang out' there and post their questions for all to see and share. Enlighten everyone.
• Make a Talk to act as a Twitter-like stream of notes from the project progress. Stay updated.
• Create a Talk to act as a pasteboard, post snippets and insights for discussion, solve code problems, do code reviews.
• Use a talk to log events - like a 'deployment log' or 'build log' for information and follow-ups.

Curious? See screenshot (from early testing at the Epicode chat).

Talk is enabled for all projects by default, but some configuration is needed to take full advantage of the feature:

1. Users of talk rooms, need TALK_USE permission. Creators of rooms need TALK_CREATE.
2. Create rooms. Start with as few rooms as possible to focus attention - increase as needed.
3. Activity in Talk rooms are recorded at hourly basis, but remember to tick-off to include 'Talk logs' in your view. Not least if you already have added Timeline RSS feeds - if so you need to grab a new feed, or edit the feed adding &talk=on to the pre-existing query parameters.

As usual, the code for the Talk plugin will be made available as open source (soon) - based on our customer promise that any project created or used at CodeResort is yours to set up anywhere else, whenever you want.

We would welcome feedback on this feature - add a comment to the blog post, or contact us with your input.

We have updated our SSL certificate. If you see a message similar to:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://www.coderesort.com:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: *.coderesort.com
 - Valid: from Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:58:50 GMT until Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:58:50 GMT
 - Issuer: Equifax Secure Inc., US
 - Fingerprint: ee:79:36:14:81:be:cb:d8:90:ca:80:3c:48:0d:32:0e:49:48:c5:e2
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

... then please accept it.

It should not be an issue with browsers, but as Subversion clients usually come without any pre-approved Certificate Authorities, all certificates must be explicitly accepted.

We have been running Subversion 1.5 on the server for some time, and tonight we have also upgraded the repository format for all existing projects. If any users are still using pre-1.5 clients, now is the time to upgrade.

Subversion 1.5 brings many improvements and new features:  http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html

First and foremost is the automagic merge-tracking support. This has been a much-requested feature, and it basically means that Subversion stores properties on your branches to remember what revisions are already integrated between them. It makes for easy copying (branching), merging and reinterating.

Take a look at these short blog posts for a quick introduction to merge-tracking:

•  iBanjo: Subversion 1.5 merge-tracking in a nutshell
•  MXUnit Blog: Subversion 1.5 Merge Tracking

And for those keen to learn even more, there is always the definitive reference...:  The Subversion Book

Do you have further links or insight? Add a comment!

Today I did a talk at  GoOpen 2009 - a two-day conference about sharing and open source.

My talk - and its description was in Norwegian:

Deling av egen kode

Et åpent tankesett har verdi for alle utviklingsprosjekter - uansett grad av faktisk ekstern åpenhet. Bli kjent med format og metoder for gjennomføring av åpne prosjekter, og erfaringer og praktiske hensyn knyttet til deling av egen kode med andre.

OpenOffice slides og alt som ble sagt som slide notater kan lastes ned her, alternativt som PDF (slide notater).

We have just released a new feature that allows 'README(*)' files to be rendered when browsing the source through the web interface ('Browse Source' menu item). This is a great feature for connecting the source with getting started and further information, licensing issues and similar.

The feature is documented in the 'Help' section as HelpUser/RepositoryReadMeFile, and it should provide the information you need to get started providing your users with better and more immediate information about your source code.

A simple example can be seen in the reiseregningen project.

As usual, we have made this feature available as Open Source - see  ReposReadMePlugin by  osimons.

Hope you like it!

A new public project from Fornyings- og administrasjonsdepartementet (FAD) - a department of the Norwegian government - has just launched on CodeResort.

The site hosts a public project for the development of  http://www.reiseregningen.no - the 'official' way to document your travel expenses in many Norwegian public and private institutions.

Visit the project (in Norwegian): reiseregningen

Almost everywhere on CodeResort we use Wiki Markup to enter text. It allows for simple and easy plain-text based input that gets converted and nicely formatted for display.

We've now made a simple 5 minute tutorial for you to get started with text input, formatting and linking - as a basic introduction to those unfamiliar with wiki markup, or as a refresh for those who have used other wikis but are unfamiliar with our markup syntax.

The tutorial is available in Help for each project as HowTo/5MinutesWikiMarkup.

Happy reading and writing!

In recent weeks and months we have experienced an issue whereby the web projects become unresponsive - basically unable to serve your requests. During this time we have kept a very close watch to make sure we get it back online as soon as possible. Still, we know that some of you no doubt have been inconvenienced by these short downtimes.

The good news is: We have discovered and fixed the cause of the issue.

A bug in [[TOC]] wiki macro only appeared when requests where made to a page in a project that used the macro, and such a project would then permanently claim one database connection. It 'infected' a project on first view, but it did not get worse by itself. However, at random intervals pages with the macro was requested on other projects tying up new connections until at some point no further database connections could be established.

(Those that are technically inclined can read about the issue and see my fix at  http://trac-hacks.org/changeset/4366)

Finding this bug has taken much longer than we had imagined. However, it has led us to review all the central parts of the code, and fixing and reworking some parts that were not optimal. Additionally, we have updated all server software to the latest and greatest versions. The service is now in very good shape.

We can only apologize, and thank you all for being patient with us trough this period.

We now have backups... Just joking - we have of course done central backups every day since doors opened back in 2006.

The big news is that if you are a project administrator, you can generate and download full backups of the web project yourself:

The new Backups Admin page is available for all regular projects, and it also has pointers to Subversion syncronisation (svnsync) and WebDAV file share access.

Together this means that every single byte of data, history and settings related to your project is available to you whenever you want it.

Enjoy!

As all projects include a WebDAV-based file share for non-repository files, we have of course also made a 'Help' page with information on how to connect. It turns out that the how-to section for 'Windows' was XP-only. Vista does this differently, and a plain Vista install even needs a fix to get it working.

We have just updated the Help page with a new 'Vista' section - look it up inside your project Help (HelpUsers/Files) to get started with WebDAV on Vista.

There seems to have been an e-mail delay today with our ISP (Broadnet.no).

We have contacted them, and the have confirmed that the there was in fact a problem, and that the problem should now be corrected. However, they warned that some further delays can still be expected as the e-mail servers catch up on the backlog of outgoing e-mails during the coming hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and please contact us if the delay persists longer than can be reasonably tolerated!

We have just renewed our SSL certificate, and the new certificate is operational as of now.

Depending on your browser, Subversion client, feed reader or other client accessing CodeResort services, you may receive a message along the lines of:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://www.coderesort.com:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: *.coderesort.com
 - Valid: from Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:40:45 GMT until Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:40:45 GMT
 - Issuer: Equifax Secure Inc., US
 - Fingerprint: 5a:d9:93:3e:a5:66:12:ea:8f:44:fe:04:41:f4:5c:b9:42:9e:6d:b2
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

Please accept the new certificate permanently, and everything should work as normal.

If you use 'Browse Source' in projects regularly, you may be interested to know that you can use the keyboard to navigate.

Use:

• 'J' to move down.
• 'K' to move up.
• 'O' or hit 'Return' to open and close folders, and to open files for reading.

Just ran some statistics and noticed that we recently passed 20.000 Subversion changesets committed to the various projects.

Hurrah!

To make CodeResort even easier to use, we have today enabled a WYSIWYG-editor for all projects.

The editor is optional, allowing you to switch between viewing modes using the wysiwyg/textarea radio buttons that will now be available on all input textareas on the site:

Ain't that nice?

Using the editor should be mostly self-explanatory - try out the buttons with or without selected text and see what happens.

This week we have made some changes to how user registration and applications for project membership works.

As before, the minimum required to create a login is a valid e-mail address. However, very often the needs of project owners extend beyond that in order to evaluate and grant permission, and to get in touch with project members if needed.

Based on this we have made a setting in a new 'Memberships' admin page:

The setting is optional for each project, and what is needed will be clearly stated on the application form. When granted access to such a project, your basic profile information (name, company and contact details) will be available to the owners of that project.

We have made a number of improvements to the registration and application forms when implementing this, and hopefully getting access to projects will be even easier than before.

Many of you (if not all of you) have relations to other systems while developing and maintaining your CodeResort project. Tickets, Wiki pages, Subversion log messages and so on fills up with full links to external systems.

It may be that you use some other bug tracker, or perhaps reference pages on test or production systems that showcase a bug. It could be anything. What makes these links a bit difficult is that they often are:

• Difficult to read and reference
• Don't get updated when a system moves from one address to another
• Not pretty

InterWiki makes it possible to build your own link syntax. In the same way you can link to a wiki:WikiStart (wiki page) or ticket:42 (ticket), you can now make a link that looks and behaves just as you need it.

Say for instance that you have a test and production setup and your project also deals with bugs on pages and content planning. If the content pages are numbered, how about referencing them as prod:525 or test:233?

If you use some other bug tracker with your project, how about just typing bug:123 and have a full external link rendered?

Or, if your project uses modules from another project, such as the epicode project that you need to reference, how about typing epicode:ticket:42 to make a link? Even display this link as descriptive text by using this pattern: [epicode:ticket:42 related issue]

Want to know how? Read up on the HelpUser/InterWiki help page - you'll find all you need to get started.

Thought I'd drop a note on yet another new feature that is easy to miss - a very useful feature for anyone using the Ticket system.

Projects contain two types of ticket listings. The listed Reports used to be SQL only. Anyone looked at the SQL or tried to modify or make new SQL-based reports? Not as easy as anyone would have liked.

Custom Query on the other hand is great for picking the criteria of the selection, selecting grouping, ordering and also what columns you would like to display. However, unless you set them up as [query:] links or inline using the [[TicketQuery]] macro, they were temporary.

No longer. This button is now available on Custom Query pages:

Saving a query as a report makes it appear on the 'View Tickets' front page, and allows you to link to it using the report syntax: {10} or report:10

Much nicer don't you think?

One of the recently available features is the ability to annotate the source code - most commonly called 'blame' support due to it's popular use of finding out who (and when) and error was introduced...

When browsing a source file, there is now a new 'Annotate' option:

Selecting it will render the changesets for each line, and the tooltip will provide some basic information - selecting the changeset will take you directly to it:

Ain't that nice?

Here is a tip for quickly navigating to a resource when you know its name. Just enter it as a link in the 'Search Project' field.

Here are some examples for you to try in your own project:

• #42 - ticket number 1
• [42] - for changeset 42
• {3} - for report number 3
• RecentChanges - for wiki page of that name

Pretty much all resources in your project is directly linkable - have a look at the HelpUser/Links help page to see the possibilities and review syntax.

Every project on CodeResort now has a Blog:

• Regular projects (/p/projectname) have a project-internal blog, available to project members only.
• User projects (/u/username) have a public blog for anonymous access - open to the world.

Blog for regular projects

The Blog is enabled by default for all projects, but only project administrators will actually see it due to their extended permissions. To let other in you need to set permissions. A typical setup based on our default permission setup is:

• Grant BLOG_MODIFY_OWN to members ('@member' group) so they can view all the news, post their own news, but not modify the news of others.
• Also, grant them BLOG_COMMENT permission so that the project members can comment on blog posts.

Why a project blog? Our motivation for this feature was to find a nice and simple way to bring any kind of 'news' into the project information - and documentation. It fills a much needed gap for information that does not fit nicely into either wiki, tickets, or changeset messages. We can't tell you how you should use it, but here are some ideas for inspiration:

• News on project organisation, introducing new project members or new responsibilities.
• Project deliveries such as releases / deployments and changeovers, announcing branches and the like.
• Pulling together a number of tickets, changesets and wiki updates into a coherent overview of what has actually happened and why.
• Notes on changes to developer setups, dependencies or similar information needed for people to do their work.

The blog has its own RSS feed for full-length messages, and it also puts all creations, edits and comments into the Timeline. Note that if you already have a Timeline RSS feed set up, you need to grab the URL again to get the blog events (blog=on needs to be added to the query string).

Try it out, and see what it can do for you and your project.

Blog for user projects

Having the blog feature available, we thought it would be a great idea for any user with their own project to also have a blog to share their findings and thoughts with others. The user project blog is all pre-configured and ready, so just get started posting.

Note: If you have a login but no user project, you basically only need to click 'Create Profile' in the top navigation menu. Fill in the form, and your own personal mini-project is created. Currently a 'user project' has the following main features:

• A Wiki, only available for you.
• 'My Tickets' - your own overview of all open tickets in all projects on CodeResort where you are somehow involved.
• The Blog that is available to the world.

If you do start using your personal blog, let us know so that we can add a link to your blog in the sidebar here.

More Information

We've also added a help page with further information about the blog - see 'Help' form inside your project, or read the wiki page here if you are logged in: HelpUser/Blog

Open Source

Lastly, just a note to say that the blog feature is made available as open source - developed and maintained by CodeResort:  http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/FullBlogPlugin

This is done to ensure that whatever data you enter into your project here at CodeResort, will also be available and accessible if you for some reason should want to move your project away from CodeResort later.

Feedback?

Do you like the blog? Does it make sense? Do you have requests for changes or new additions to the functionality?

We made it for you, and appreciate any help you can give us in making this a useful feature.

Last night we upgraded CodeResort to a new version bringing lots of shiny new features. There will be in-depth introductions to new features and usage examples shortly to get you started using them, so for the moment I just wanted to provide some important information to current users about some changes that may involve minor updates in your projects related to wiki syntax:

1. The [[TOC]] macro has changed slightly, so for a list of pages 'starting with...' you now need to append a '*' to the partial pagename. Without the wildcard, it will only fetch the page with that exact name. Some of the other macros have also seen minor changes, so if they don't work as expected be sure to look at the Help page for HelpUser/WikiMacros.
2. Syntax for project- and server-relative linking has now changed. [/somewhere] now uses the project as root for urls, so if you want to link to some resource in another project you use this syntax to base it on the server root: [//somewhere]. Or, even better is the new InterWiki syntax that lets you make your own custom links to external resources. Check HelpUser/InterWiki for now - I'll blog about this in not too long.
3. The {{{#!html}}} syntax is still allowed, but each section now has to be valid html in order to render - if not, it will be skipped. The trick of embedding wiki inside some open and close html element sections now have a better solution using the new #!div and [[span]] syntax. Read up on this in Help; HelpUser/WikiAdvanced.

Updating all our own content, these were the most visible to us. If you find other issues that are not clearly covered here or in Help, please let us now. Perhaps by logging in and leaving a comment on this blog post.

Lastly, here are some of the new features that I have in my 'to-blog' list - make sure to check back soon or subscribe to the blog RSS feed:

• Project Blog for project-internal news and information, and even a public blog for any users that have created a profile at CodeResort.
• InterWiki link support.
• Improved ticket workflow and ticket and query improvements in general.
• Subversion 'Annotate' (Blame) of any file in the repository.
• Turn off or on features for your project.
• Wiki page templates for standardising content and structure of new wiki pages.
• ...and more.

Hope you enjoy the new release! Stay tuned!

Welcome to CodeResort, and the official CodeResort blog!

We will use the blog for any information about the service to our users, so make sure to check back often to get the latest news and how-to's to utilise the service for your project.

The blog is available for anonymous read access, and any RSS feed reader will be able to read our syndicated content.

As a CodeResort user you can also comment on the blog posts. Make sure you are logged in, and an 'Add Comment' field will be available. We do appreciate your feedback, so please let us know your opinion!

Best regards,

The CodeResort Team