Charles Vallance

I was reading a blog entry from Mr Rowan Simpson (of trademe fame) about an idea he had and I think he's onto a winner...

From his site:

The problem

It is very difficult to ensure that all of the page in a large and dynamic web sites contain valid HTML, especially as changes are made to those pages over time.

...

The Solution

While developing and testing a site, or even just while browsing, we typically visit a large number of different pages.

The proposed tool will run in the background while we use the website and capture the details of each HTTP request and corresponding response. The HTML that is returned can then be validated asynchronously by the tool.

At the end of the browsing session (or even during, if required) the tool will provide a list of the pages that have been visited and a count of the number of warnings or errors contained on each. The user will be able to drill into the details of any page to investigate the cause of the warnings or errors.

This would allow developers and testers to quickly and easily validate a large number of pages, including those that require users to post form information and login, without any extra work over and above what they are already doing.

I love the idea, it would make for a fantastic firefox extension. It would be extremely useful, especially with the NZ Government Web Standards.

Actually, the more I think about it, it could make an excellent google analytics type piece of software that collected info automatically behind the scenes and kept a nice history (showing trends etc like Rowan mentions) for you to review at your lesuire.

This could potentially put alot of additional stress on a site, but if its done right...

Unfortunately, like Rowan, I don't have that sort of spare time on my hands either! :-/ I'd love for someone to pick up the ball and run with it!

Currently I'm trying to install Subversion on my home machine and I'm finding that I'm having to grab installation instructions from here, there and everywhere! So I'm going to try and write some instructions on how to install Subversion and Tortoise as I did on my Windows XP Pro box.

First of all, grab the latest versions of Subversion and Tortiose (both at version 1.4.4 at the time of writing). There are a few options to download on the Subversion side of things, I just grabbed the .zip file described as 'Subversion 1.4.4 Win32 binaries'.

After this you should unzip the subversion files into any directory of your choice, I unzipped them to C:\SVN. You may run into problems futher down the road if you unzip them to a directory with spaces, but I'll touch on that when it could crop up.

Next we to set up some enviroment variables for subversion. So go to your System Properties by going through Control Panel -> System or you can get there by right clicking My Computer and then clicking Properties.

Once in System Properties go to the Advanced tab and click on Eviroment Variables down the bottom. Then find the 'Path' variable under System Variables and tack the Subversion bin directory, eg. C:\Svn\bin, onto the end of the path variable.

Next you have to add a new System Variable called SVN_EDITOR whos value should point to your favourite text editor. I use Notepad++ so the value of my SVN_EDITOR looked something like 'C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe'. If unsure which editor to use, just use note pad 'C:\WINDOWS\notepad.exe'.

Next you should create the directory that will contain all your repositories (I used 'D:\Repositories').

Now we need to setup the svnseve as a windows service. From the Command Prompt you need to type to following:

sc create svnserve binpath= "C:\SVN\bin\svnserve --service -r D:\Repositories" displayname= "Subversion Server" depend= Tcpip start= auto

Obviously you should replace all the relevant parts with your own. I'm mainly talking about the C:\SVN\bin\svnserve & D:\Repositories. Also this is where you can run into problems if you unzipped Subversion into a directory with spaces. If you did you will have to change it to something similar to:

sc create svnseve binpath= "\"C:\Program Files\SVN\bin\svnserve\" --service -r D:\Repositories" displayname= "Subversion Server" depend= Tcpip start= auto 

Follow? Good, cause we're just about there! :)

So after you get a successful service installation you should go ahead and start the service. After you have done this we should check everything is running smoothly. So lets create a repository...

From the Command Prompt you need to navigate to your repository driectory (D:\Repositories) in my case and type something similar to:

svnadmin create TestRepository

This will now create a repository called TestRepository, who would've guessed?!

To test to make sure everything is running smoothly type the following into the Command Prompt:

svn info svn://localhost/TestRepository

And you should get some information about the repository spat back at you. If you do, then yehaw for you cause all you have to do now is install Tortoise, restart your puter and you're away laughing!

Ps. Could you tell I started off with all the time in the world and then ended in a hurry? Thought so... I'll flesh things out later if need be.