Xaprb

I just adore Google Code. But the default wiki view (a list of pages, sorted by last-modified) is lacking something. Fortunately, it’s fixable. Here’s the before:

Default wiki list

And here’s the after:

Wiki with sidebar and default page

Here’s how:

1. Create a wiki page called TableOfContents, or something like that. Using normal wiki syntax, enter links and text for your table of contents. The best way to do this is to use bulleted lists to organize and outline the pages. Keep in mind that we’ll use this same text for the sidebar, so keep it brief.
2. Go to Administer/Wiki and enter that wiki page’s name in the “Wiki Sidebar” box. Save the changes.
3. Go to Administer/Tabs and enter the same page in the Wiki box. Save the changes.

Now both the wiki “homepage” and the sidebar will contain the page you created. No more ugly list-of-pages. And as you navigate through the wiki pages, the sidebar automatically expands and closes the outline to show where you are.

If you want, you can use a different homepage and sidebar, but I’ve found that it works well for me to use the same page for both. It’s a preference, that’s all.

There’s one more trick I’d like to share: you can add the text <wiki:toc /> at the top of any page to create a small table of contents for that page. There are ways to customize it — check the documentation for more options.

Google Code just rocks. It is clean, sparse, elegant, and it has all the functionality I need. Its template-driven issue tracking system (totally flexible and totally easy to flex!), niceties like cross-references between issues and Subversion revisions, simple but completely adequate Wiki, and nice download system are the bomb. And the code reviews and ability to comment on revisions are super nice. Oh, and it’s really nice that the data is stored in a place I feel pretty sure is safe.

It has all the nice features I admired a lot about Trac, which is my other favorite collaboration tool for software development.

A while ago I moved Maatkit development to Google Code from Sourceforge. It was a move I’d been considering but dreading. A friend pushed me over the edge by promising to migrate the Subversion repo for me. In all it was really painless, and certainly a move that has enabled Maatkit’s development to proceed much more quickly and smoothly than it would have at Sourceforge. Not to pick on Sourceforge, but their interface is seemingly designed to prevent you from getting anything done — it is really hard to use in about every possible way, and makes simple tasks take hours (making a new release, anyone?). And Sourceforge doesn’t even back up your data! What’s the point of project hosting if you’re supposed to back up your own revision control, website, and database?

Thank you Google!

Download Maatkit

Maatkit version 2152 is ready for download. This release is also known as the “is this project really alive?” release. We thought we should delay until MySQL released a new Community Server version. Just kidding — it has nothing to do with that.