SOPA protest page and 503 redirect

Tomorrow, 18t January 2012, many websites will protest against the US SOPA and PIPA acts. For example Wikipedia will go blank in protest for 24 hours.

For those intending to blackout their own websites (or in the future intend to do something similar, e.g. a more practical "web site temporarily down message" while doing an upgrade etc, here are a few tips:

First of all Google recommend you do not simple just change your website front page to a blank page or similar. As this can have repercussions on your SEO, ie your search ranking. Read more about it in this post on Google+ by a Googler. They recommend a 503 error response instead. Which indicates the site is temporarily down.

So a simple change of index.html is not recommended. Nor is a simple redirect in the html's meta header, nor a plain http 302 redirect. All this can affect your ranking.

I recommend (if using Apache 2) to use mod_rewrite in this manner:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503
Alias /stop-sopa /var/www/stop-sopa
ErrorDocument 503 /stop-sopa/index.html
RewriteRule !^s/stop-sopa$ /stop-sopa [L,R=503]


This uses Alias to another folder so that the same message can be used for several virtual hosts. It uses a custom ErrorDocument to display a human readable blackout page. And it uses RewriteRule to redirect all requests to the stop-sopa page (except for request for /stop-sopa so that you don't get an infinite loop).

If you are looking for a page to use as the blackout page, there is a nice github project page for just that. An example can be viewed here.

Agile project tools for personal/open source projects

Been briefly assessing some online free tools for agile task planning for a few personal FOSS projects.

A physical task board is perhaps the suggestion from the agile purists, however not useful for me (nor my family :)).

At work I often have to use the awful Quality Center. It is good for planning functional testing, but not much else. The user interface is painful, and only works on windows with IE.

But most project I have been on eventually drop it for the more developer friendly Jira by Atlassian. Its UI gets cleaner and cleaner. And is great for Scrum projects since the intergration of GreenHopper. It is however very feature rich which is good and bad, and sometimes quite slow. I recommend Jira for distributed larger organisations. It is however an overkill for my needs.

I have been using Pivotal Tracker for some of my projects for a few years. It is a great tool. For scrum projects it is the tool I would recommend the most. They recently started charging but it is still free for public projects. It is however very iteration/scrum centric and as such not useful for my more Kanbanish time irrelevant requirements.

So I started to look at more tools (and revisit some previous ones).
My requirements are:

1. Free, as in beer or near enough. $9/month and similar is too much for personal projects unless heavily used.


2. Agile task board simulation


3. Not time iteration based


4. Simple functional UI, but not ugly


5. Icebox feature for storing tasks/ideas not yet ready for the backlog


6. Pivotal like Feature, Chore and Bug classification


7. Limiting WIP


8. Kanban queues


9. Simple T-shirt or fibonacci estimates

Not all requirements have to be met.

Here are my initial impressions:

Pivotal Tracker

Time iterative centric.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
No WIP limit.
No kanban queue.
Got Icebox feature
Got Feature-chore-bug classification.
Fibonacci estimates.
Unlimited free public projects.

AgileZen

Kanban style flow.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
Columns can be renamed.
Got WIP limit.
No icebox. Can rename backlog icebox and rename another column backlog.
No estimates
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
FOSS projects can apply for free usage.

Kanbanery

Kanban style flow.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
Columns can be renamed.
Got WIP limit.
Got Icebox feature
Got Feature-chore-bug classification.
T-shirt estimates.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

Kanbanpad

Kanban style flow.
Clean interface.
Little confusing UI.
Got Kanban queues.
Got WIP limit.
Got Icebox (the "backlog").
No estimates.
Unlimited projects.
All plans are free.
Permissions are strange. No member can edit and public can only view. Either member view and edit with no public access, or public(anonymous) can view and edit!!

Leankit

Kanban style flow.
Seems very feature rich. Perhaps too many features.
UI a little cluttered.
Tasks seems too much like post-it notes.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

ScrumDO

Scrum focused.
Looks nice.
Feature rich.
UI a little confusing.
No Icebox.
No WIP limit.
No kanban queue.
Fibonacci and t-shirt estimates.
10 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

Flow

Kanban style flow.
Tasks seems too much like post-it notes.
No Icebox.
Got WIP limit.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
FOSS projects can apply for free usage.


I may update this in the future when I get more impressions of the ones I use and if I find other tools.


My recommendations depends, but currently they are:

• For large commercial projects Jira offer features and reports. And can be installed inside your firewall.


• For Scrum projects Pivotal Tracker offers the most complete package.


• For Kanban projects, the it depends on your own requirements and taste, but my current favourites are Kanbanery and AgileZen. Kanbanpad's no restrictions on number of projects is also tempting

Play! 2.0 in IntelliJ IDEA

Play! Framework 1.x supported creating an IntelliJ IDEA project by the command: play idealize.

However while Play! Framework 2.0 is in beta that command does not work**.

So how do you get your Play! 2.0 project to open in IntelliJ IDEA? There are few different work arounds. Especially regarding integrating sbt.

However I have a quick way. For this to work you need both Play! 2.0 and Play! 1.2.x installed.

Create Play! 2.0 project:
/usr/local/lib/play-2.0-beta/play new helloworld
(I am assuming it was a Java project that you chose)

Rename project folder:
mv helloworld helloworld2

Create Play! 1.x project:
/usr/local/lib/play-1.2.4/play new helloworld

Create IntelliJ project:
cd helloworld;
/usr/local/lib/play-1.2.4/play idealize

Move IntelliJ files to Play! 2.0 project:
cd ..;
mv helloworld/helloworld.i* helloworld2/

Remove 1.x project and rename 2.0 folder:
rm -rf helloworld;
mv helloworld2 helloworld

Now you can open IntelliJ and then go to file/open project, then find and open helloworld/helloworld.ipr.


There will be some issues such as libraries etc but this a good start. For further tips try these suggestions.


** As of 11th of January 2012 it is not present in Play! 2.0. I fully expect Play! to create an idealize, eclipsify, netbeansify etc as soon as 2.0 is stable.