Jamie: hell yea
Jamie: nice ass
Jamie: mat
- Richard Neary

While conversing with my friend.

A lot of my inspiration comes from well... the things I see and hear. But, a lot of it also comes from my dreams, sometimes I really do dream making a website.
- Richard Neary

Where do you get your inspiration? This probably is the most common question asked of artists. Some may find it difficult to answer, while others lay it down simply. There're no wrong answers, inspiration comes from anywhere, at anytime from anything. Everyone has some form of inspiration, whether they are conscience of it or not. Artists specifically, really exemplify this. Can an artist be inspired by nothing and still produce material? It may be possible, but I can't imagine it.

Here's what has happened in the last while. Summer of 2007 I toured Europe. Over a month in England, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and five days in Amsterdam for my birthday. Toured the Heineken brewery, maybe had a few too many, can't remember that well. Also saw the BMW factory, we weren't allowed to take pictures, it was still worth it though. Those Germans are ingenious.

I now use Slicehost with Symphony, an awesome publishing platform by the guys at Twentyone Degrees (thank you!). Also many props to Slicehost for the great VPS, the Slice rebuild feature is a life saver.

My plan for this site is simple. It will be my personal write bin, with absolutely positively zero rules. The design may look horrible, the code may not validate, your browser may be subject to total war (be prepared IE, be very prepared), and you may flame my writing as much as you wish. You've been warned.

The following are step by step instructions for compiling and installing Subversion 1.4.6 on a shared hosting environment.

Subversion (SVN) is a popular VCS or Version Control System. A VCS simply allows one, or a group of users to manage multiple revisions of the same information. Check out Subversion's home page for more information.

Troubleshooting

If you run into problems or errors during installation, take a minute to read over the instructions again. Failing that, I'd recommend a Google search. Finally, if all else fails, send me an email (posted in the sidebar).

Make a Backup

While it's almost impossible anything bad will happen, I would highly recommend creating a current backup of all your data. Just in case.

Prerequisites

Here's a list of what your host must have.

• Linux operating system
• Shell access (everything will be done through SSH)

A basic understanding of Linux is beneficial, however, not required.

The Setup

Login to your account via SSH and change to your home directory with cd ~/.

It's nice to keep everything tidy, so let's create a new directory to act as our workspace.

mkdir ~/sources
cd ~/sources

Downloading and Extraction

Download and unpack the Subversion source code with the following commands.

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.4.6

Building and Installation

Installation only requires three commands. If you are linux savvy feel free to add your own configurations, otherwise the ones included should suffice.

./configure --prefix=$HOME --without-berkley-db -with-zlib --with-ssl
make
make install

Don't panic if you see warnings about Berkley DB. Subversion supports two types of data storage, BDB and FSFS (a flat file system). If you'd like to know the differences then take a look at Data Store section in the SVN Book.

Wrap Up

To make sure everything worked, enter the command svn --version. The output should be similar to this.

svn --version
$ svn, version 1.4.6 (r28521)
...

Well done. Subversion works, go svn co stuff!

Useful Links

So what's next? Here are a couple links to help in your Subversionated adventures.

• Version Control with Subversion
• Subversion FAQ