I’ll just quickly get into, why I decided to actually write this book in the first place, when I was approached by a publisher.

free and private git hosting

Free as in speech and private as in: “It’s on your server, take all the security measures and algorithms you prefer!”, that’s what GitLab is. It’s great for independent infrastructure, unlimited repositories or even full backups of repositories that primarily reside somewhere else.

If you want to create an incubation chamber for your projects, where they can undergo development, shielded from the curious public or simply want to keep the code you track with git private and safe, this is a possible tool for you.

git server with a great GUI

GitLab is pretty strong in terms of having a consistent and user friendly web interface. It’s just nice to use and I’m storing all my software projects in there, even a report for the academy and the book I’m writing.

Wait! How did this happen?

Well, a couple of weeks ago I was approached by a publisher, that has quite a record of books on open source software and also other projects, if I was up for writing a book on GitLab, since I’ve written a couple of blog posts about git and GitLab. Since I had never tried writing a book before, I said yes and started laying down an outline of the contents.

When will it hit the shelves?

I assume it’s mostly going to be published digitally, but that’s a pure speculation based on what would make sense in my head and where I’d be most likely to buy such a book.

I can’t say when exactly it’s going to be available if it gets approved, but pretty soon, if everything goes well!

However, if you want to stay up to date on when it is released, just follow me on twitter, facebook, Google+ or subscribe to my RSS feed. I will announce any updates about this on every of these channels!

I’d love you to stay up to date with this, if you’re interested in GitLab and there will be reading samples!

In my studies as a Multimedia Designer in Denmark I even handed in some papers that were written in HTML and compiled to PDF.

That clearly was not the most practical, but for me the most bearable of these alternatives. Plain text is just great, especially for people who write a lot or the ones that code on a somewhat daily basis.

Writers should not be bound to an editor when trying to publish for a certain channel.

I believe in this! Even though I publish almost everything electronically, either to the university or to one of my sites, having the source material in MarkDown files enables you to just pass them on to somebody and they can convert it to many formats or just read it straight away with the many great editors that do the markup for you, so you can focus on reading and not how your version of Word or similar chooses to display. You set the rules.

MarkDown Genius Syntax

It doesn’t get any easier to write rich texts, than with MarkDown. Rich in terms of being able to paste any sort of HTML, easily link, insert images and with some extensions even add footnotes.

Interoperability

What an ugly word, I mean: you can use it anywhere. Every plain text editor supports it, from Notepad and Vim to specialised editors like Mou, MarkdownPad or UberWriter. What you write you can copy to HTML and put it straight into your blog or export a PDF for the not-yet-MarkDown infected.

If you want to, you can also use it directly in Chrome, Firefox and Thunderbird with a little extension called Markdown Here.

Great for Geeks

MarkDown is easy to pick up and use, but for the ones who write code it has some more perks. You can track changes to markdown documents with git or any version control system for that matter. Also it just is a plain text file with a couple of more cool things, so you can run your scripts and regexes on it easily.

It’s got rendering packages for PHP, node.js and ruby to mention a couple of server side environments and both WordPress.org and github require you to submit your documentation and README files in it.

MarkDown FTW?

I’m getting pretty positive responses of people around me who I’ve been telling about it and that it quickly becomes a part of their workflow. Have you tried markdown and if so, what do you think of it?

My incentive for throwing in 10£ was that backers get a month early access to the projects source code, whereas everyone else will be granted that about a month later. Time for me to poke at this project, which I am burning to do.

Features of Ghost

A really amazing thing I really miss about WordPress is support for MarkDown out of the box. Apart from that, the visual appearance seems to be very simplistic and easy to approach, which I would surely appreciate for my clients. Based on the blazing speed of node.js is a huge bonus for me, since I’ve started digging into that and am currently building a project on the same platform.

Will it replace WordPress?

What kind of question is that? 20.000 Plugins, countless Themes and a huge community, combined with the spread of PHP in our server landscape will not go away, no matter what chunk Ghost rips out of the pie that WordPress has in the current web industry.

A lot of interested people want to see this happen though, as the Kickstarter campaign shows.

I have and since I’m primarily back on Linux now, this wasn’t a hard thing to do. For the first time I really looked at executing bash commands from inside node.js. The very quickly written and barely documented source is to be found here: https://github.com/JonathanMH/morse-board

Luckily somebody already wrote a module for the hard work in this: morse and for giving me less headaches with control flow: async.

Enjoy the quick YouTube demo below and tell me if you make anything in your home blink!

I’ve become closer friends with vim, but sometimes, when you really don’t want to think about your editor, simpler applications are nice, especially for fans of zen writing.

Features

One of the coolest things about it is actually the formatting of headlines, which appear outside the left of the document.

Apart from that, its markup supports some of pandoc’s extensions like footnotes in markdown by default.

Also pretty cool, is the Focus Mode, which fades out anything but the current sentence you’re working on.

It’s not as mature as other MarkDown editors, but it’s definitely one of the better ones out there!

Getting UberWriter

Either you can buy it on the Ubuntu Software Center for 5$, or just add the repository provided by the author:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:w-vollprecht/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install uberwriter

If you like it, consider donating a few bucks to the author through PayPal or Flattr! I considered it worth it and threw 5€ at the project, just after downloading it yesterday.

Check him out if you’re interested in using Blender, which is actively developed and also very easy possibilities of building render farms with it, when one computer simply isn’t efficient at rendering a scene.

First, introduction of toolkits, group building and idea generation tasks were on the schedule, followed by a supply of sandwiches and softdrinks.

The theme of the sprint was to utilize the information exposed by institutions within Odense, which up front were listed as possible data sources on the events page.

Data Sources featured different APIs to deliver geodata about different types of places in the city, from playgrounds to libraries.

Participants developed web app mockups with jQuery mobile, built native apps through Titanium or with Xcode for iOS and Eclipse for Android. This variety was great to see for us, because diversity and professional exchange are one of the goals of the project

As counsellors it was just our job to check up on groups progress, concepts and lend a hand if API access or other code implementations didn’t work out as planned. With @iewucizz on the visual side and @KClausendk and me as code counsellors, we hopped from group to group, trying to improve with debugging and creative input. It was some pretty cool and productive 24 hours, which I think is a great idea for learning and producing a lot of stuff fast, even if you’ve never heard of it before.

After a long night and morning of work on concept and prototype, the judges gave the winning 3 groups feedback on their apps and handed over a Nexus 7 for each group, among some other cool prizes, like a full day of work from an app dev firm called woerk!

Again some of my favourite lyrics:

Florence + The Machine – Shake it Out

I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play
And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn
It’s always darkest before the dawn

Foo Fighters – Pretender

I’m the voice inside your head
You refuse to hear
I’m the face that you have to face
Mirrored in your stare
I’m what’s left, I’m what’s right
I’m the enemy
I’m the hand that will take you down
Bring you to your knees

If you want a quick recap of what git is, visit their official site or read my previous post Why you should start using git now

What I’ve been doing so far

About 1.5-2 years ago I started getting into git, because I wanted to take part in developing software smartly, in teams and take part in global open source projects.

I keep my WordPress plugins on github, parallel to the WordPress plugin repository and a couple of months ago I started fixing minor mistakes in other projects.

Update 19. 05. 2013:
I'm writing a book on git and GitLab, read more here: Writing a book on GitLab

github is a great entry point

The folks at github have done an amazing job at making git simple for the masses. They have extensive documentation and a not very feature rich, but easy to use client for Linux and Mac.

What I do now

Since I’ve taken the private server in use, parallel to my open source projects on github, I’ve put a lot more stuff into git repos and actually published them to a team.

Open Source? -> github

Material for workshops goes on my github account by default, visible to everyone. It’s extremely practical when teaching. You can just make people download a .zip and have them play with the prepared code. I’ve done this for the WordPress workshop and Eriks chipped in with a repository too.

on the private git(lab) server

Study and exam projects, simple tech demos for fellow students who are interested in the same topics and closed projects go into the private repositories.

Study Projects

(at the moment my favourite client is GitX, because it allows me to ignore unstaged files when I want to push other commits)

Since I’ve successfully infected @KClausenDK with markdown, we write our study projects in it, so we started tracking those with git too.

Currently we have to convert everything in the end, because of outdated and boring academical requirements like footnotes, print versions, etc.

Groups and Teams

GitLab has two meaningful ways to share repositories among developers, except just inviting another user to one of yours.

Teams

Teams just represent a group of people, in control of one git repository.

Groups

Groups are way cooler, because they represent a group of people, in charge of multiple repositories, that are collected in a namespace. That looks like: http://yourdomain.com/groups/node_junkies and shows a list of recent activity by all developers and a list of repositories at the side.

Summary

It’s very liberating to be able to fire up as many repositories as you want, featuring an idiot proof web interface and share it with people of your choice. Also that these can manage their own ssh-keys, which takes manual work off the server admin.

If you want to try out my gitlab server, take a look at our humble first steps with node.js or have a question, drop me a comment, mail, tweet or message.