Active User Guide
Contents
1. appear inc sets colours for all active apps db setup php3 sql db config webcast webcast setup php3 config variables for webcast webcast webcast inc header and footer defini tions for webcast 3 5 2 how to setup a new active city Warning These notes assume you already have active running atleast one city on your server They re also out of date Sorry about that Permissions needed to do it e a login to cat with membership of the active and geeks groups setup with usermod G active geeks lt username gt e access to the postgresql database as a user on cat with permissions to create databases createuser lt username gt 28 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server e super user on cat to setup mailing lists for the city use makelist and makelistarchive If the city will be hosted on cat org au also known as active org au login to cat and then run the commands cd www active new_city cityname The new_city script checks out copies of the code puts them in the new cityname folder www active cityname also it creates a new copy within CVS of the local folder for the new city active cityname local copied from the active template city and checks it out into www active cityname local Certain folders and files are created and marked with open permissions so the web server can write to them e g the calendar text databases and the webcast uploads folder It then creates2. sydney indymedia org Colene Woods for putting so much of her heart into the start up of indymedia in Sydney Inspirations ideas skills community media in Australia including the Community Broadccasting Association of Australia and their virtual conferences where we learnt lots about webcasting Community Access TV CAT s ancestor all the groups mentioned in the goals and context section above Reclaim the Streets Sydney and Chapter 1 About Active 10 globally for great parties and webcasting from the footpath The free software movement for providing so many powerful tools we could learn from and build on slashdot http slashdot org for making the free software movement visible and self aware and for trusting their audience The folks at freespeech org http freespeech org Colorado USA for meeting up with a stranger from Australia in October 1999 Peter McGregor for making the email link between cat and the indymedia centre in Seattle USA Mansour Jacobi for trusting in our cobbled together software mess and linking it into the indymedia project web design hacks and generally being a technical backbone All the amazing street activists media activists and geek activists who made the Seattle World Trade Organisation protests November 1999 such a turning point The activists from the global South for still being there when finally us rich country folks woke up and were ready to hear the real story and help fix it
3. script to clean up the output from the above hack to make it easier to read and edit perl pi bak e undef s n gt gt n g filename sgml For more than you ever wanted to know about DocBook see DocBook The Definitive Guide http www oreilly com catalog docbook chapter book docbook html This appendix is Revision 1 5 The last update was on Date 2001 06 11 04 57 53 at which time the current release version of active was 1 7 Ocvs
4. throughout this guide the technical information assumes you are running Debian GNU Linux http www debian org 2 2 on your webserver and possibly for other tasks such as documentation It ll probably work fine on other versions of Unix and probably not so well on Windows or Mac it s just that wanted to work out a complete reproducible path to setting things up and Debian seems to provide a good starting point It s also what have easily available to test with If you d like to see it documented it under alternative systems please write it up and send it in and I ll include it 1 6 sections of this guide we still need to write e how to use the site as a web surfing reader and writer and media producer e how to maintain the site over the web and otherwise e step by step installation and setup e software design or lack of it ll Chapter 1 About Active e how to best contribute programming to the project check for consensus on new features or make them optional e how the webcoders collective is organised 12 Chapter 2 Editing and Managing an Active Website This chapter is Revision 1 2 The last update was on Date 2001 05 19 12 47 24 at which time the current release version of active was 1 7 Ocvs 2 1 Overview how active creates pages The web pages are generated in several different ways 1 the static web pages including the about and howto sections are generated using server side includ
5. There is a lot of more up to date info at tech indymedia org http tech indymedia org We have a to do list using the bugs tracking system at sourceforge http sourceforge net project group_id 819 If you re really keen you can join the webcoders cvs list geton webcoders cvs active org au mailto geton webcoders cvs cat org au where you will be barraged with automated logging emails everytime someone is hacking on the code There is a digest version on the indymedia servers also called webcoders cvs http lists indymedia org mailman listinfo webcoders cvs 38 Chapter 4 Active Software Development 4 2 Key design ideas e any story can be linked to any other e g a picture can be linked to a report about the same thing e a still image from a video can be linked to the video e a high quality MP3 audio file can be linked to a lower quality realaudio version e a series of pictures from the same event can be linked this is the best way we could think of letting people collect related webcast stories together yet still keep the flow of new stories coming The logic is if people have to wait until they ve got all the related stories together before posting them in a bunch or figure out what keywords to use it just slows people dowm and when you slow people down who are publishing for a live webcast that means you end up simply missing out on a lot of stories There is probably a lot more that could be done here
6. a new SQL database active_cityname There is also a need to setup the mirroring of multimedia content This is not yet automated by the new_city script We do this by making each cities uploads folder a link into a folder named after the city in www active uploads e g for a new city cd www active uploads mkdir cityname chmod 777 cityname cd www active cityname local webcast rm r uploads ln s www active uploads cityname uploads The new city will be then available at the web address active org au cityname 3 5 2 1 Things to customise for a new active site e local appear inc defines the colour scheme for the site e the local include folder has the front page and the headers and footers for all pages Specifically edit top inc and top2 inc to change the HTML that appears at the top 29 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 30 of the generated file e g a banner at the top of every page or a left hand sidebar And edit bottom inc to change what appears at the bottom of the HTML e g a right hand side bar or a footer You can edit local webcast webcast inc to change the way these include files are used or add new ones see the top and bottom functions which get called anywhere a page is being generated in the webcast code E g index php3 symlink to gt front php3 gt which then calls top Stitle function defined in local webcast webcast inc which writes the HTML heade
7. s_quickref QuickRefCard A4 pdf e If you re setting up a server from scratch you ll need to choose an operating system OS and a distribution of that OS I Matthew have had a lot of good experiences with Debian Linux http www debian org Debian is an awe inspiring collective effort of hundreds of volunteers who package up Linux and associated free software It works particularly well for remotely maintained web servers and it s used at cat active s home and indymedia on the US stallman and London durutti webservers 3 3 Handy shell environment tricks 16 It s always a bit confusing to me how best to configure default shell aliases and environment variables Unfortunately debian doesn t seem to be well documented in this regard But by playing with debian 2 2 I think I figured out how it works For normal text shell logins either at the machine or over the net with ssh you need to add aliases and environment variables to etc profile Except for some annoying reason this file is not read when you login under X for that you need to add stuff to etc bash bashrc which is not read by text mode shells at startup There must be a better way to do this So it s useful to add aliases for proc cvsa cvsp function proc com mand echo USER PID CPU MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME CO MAND command ps auxwwwwwww grep grep v grep export CVSA pserver anonymous cvs
8. straight out when CHANGES comes up in an editor and answer y when asked if you want to overwrite the tar file It will generate a couple of extra CVS commit messages as it switches the release version txt version number back and forth but that s OK Do as the script says write an email to webcoders cat org au blind CC to the big users of the software at imc tech indymedia org and webkids cat org au At some point we will probably want to setup a list just for announcements of new releases A list for general users might be good too And announce on freshmeat net ask maffew for the freshmeat login which controls the active project Isiting on there You will need an even more summarised list of changes for freshmeat approximately 1 2 paragraphs Include this at the top of the webcoders email too Appendix A Editing This Guide This guide is written in Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML DocBook This is a bit like HTML but it has better features for longer documents It can be used to generate contents cross references and indexes multipage HTML manuals PDF or postscript and a bunch of other things For a rough and ready quickstart read Get Going With DocBook http nis www lanl gov rosalia mydocs docbook intro docbook intro html Unfortunately SGML is less forgiving than HTML So there are a bunch of tools that make it easier See the LDP Author Guide http www linuxdoc org LDP LDP Author Guide for deta
9. you shouldn t need to edit anything outside of the local folder and its subfolders Unless of course you want to do some heavy duty customising local db setup php3 the configuration stuff on how to access the PostgreSQL server over TCP IP local about e the about page currently static with header and footer includes local calendar calendar setup e the main configuration file for the calendar local calendar Calendar_session_files temporary session files used to keep track of individual visitor settings local calendar Databases e the flat text event databases events users and a unique ID counter local calendar Databases dummy 23 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 24 I think you can have subfolders like this to manage multiple calendars not sure because we don t use it local groups configuration files for the groups listing local howto the howto page listing useful resources currently static with header and footer includes local images the logo that goes in the top right hand corner and some other images we use local include front page bits including a feature banner feature inc and a blurb at the bottom of the left hand column front inc and the headers and footers used for all pages header is formed by sandwiching the logo in between top1 inc and top2 inc footer just uses bottom inc local news news setup local news cache as the front page news
10. Active User Guide Matthew Arnison webcoders http cat org au lists webcoders the active software development collective maffew cat org au Active User Guide by Matthew Arnison Active is a set of web scripts for helping activists share news events and group information The news system handles multimedia open publishing and high traffic This guide explains how to use the software at several different levels for users of an active web site for people organising the site for people setting up and maintaining the software and for people programming the software The current release version of active is 1 7 Ocvs The guide is under the GNU Free Documentation License http www gnu org copyleft fdl html Table of Contents 6 sections of this guide we still need to WYite eee ee eeeeeeseeeeeeseeecneeeens oO E Website sisisissssssssssrsessscsssisssssssrsnssissseesssssrsss dL 8 1 what software it depends on ssessessssesesessssesesesneseseneseesesesereeseseseenenesesennd 4 9 2 Learning LINUX cctnesdennaancitan ans veuigiatanbennanennaisajaniusonenasu EAA ENESA NESAS 5 8 3 Handy shell environment CLICKS s eseeeeeeeeeeseseseeesrsrseererrsrserrerrsrserrerrsrseerent 16 3 5 2 how tO setup a NEW ACTIVE CITY cece ceeccceccscccsscesscesceesccesscesscusceeeceuss 28 3 5 2 1 Things to customise for a new ACTIVE site 29 3 5 3 HOW tO setup a NEW indymedia CILY cc
11. But this seemed to work quite well at both J18 and N30 e cache pages that are heavy duty database queries the frontN html pages require quite a nasty SQL query because of the completely general and probably vastly improvable way we have implemented story linking e the scripts in the actual webcast folder are kept as general possible anything specific to a particular city or eevent should go in the local folder This helps in two ways 1 people wondering what to customise first can go to the local folder 2 it helps us developers manage changes to the software e use relative links always in both the URLs and within scripts for including files in fact there are no absolute paths ideally this gets a bit tangly but makes it heaps easier to setup new sites for new cities or events and also new sites for testing or for different developers to play with because you can put the active folder wherever you want to in the web tree and it still works 39 Chapter 4 Active Software Development If you want the webcast folder to be top level you can do it with symlinks but 1 think are nicer ways to do it like having the front page do a static include of active local webcast cache front0 html although you do need to munge the relative links in that case which is what we have done for active org au sydney and friends e config files with passwords in them end in php3 so they can t be snooped over the web e all the uploaded
12. C INC contains you need to install the CPAN Time DaysInMonth module perl MCPAN e shell cpan gt install Time DaysInMonth cpan gt quit then test it again index cgi Content type text html lt HTML gt lt HEAD gt and when it prints a web page it means it s working For an example layout see the template indymedia calendar http template indymedia org calendar display front amp days 8 template indymedia org is a copy of what a default new indymedia city looks like The newswire is on the left and the events for the next week are listed on the right Obviously we need to tweak the defaults For a good looking active calendar site see active sydney http active org au sydney 33 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 34 You can control a lot of things in local calendar calendar setup the rest are in local appear inc e g the colour settings are shared between the webcast newswire and the calendar See below for details on customisation One important feature you might want to use is the weekly email calendar You need a mailing list to send the calendar out to which active doesn t do so get one from an activist server or Yahoo groups or something You can usually add a subscription box to your headers or sidebar on your site to make it easy for people to sign up Then choose someone to receive the calendar every week and pass it on to the
13. ML tags please put anything specific to the local city in the local folder somehow and only put code that would be applicable to any installation of active into the other folders such as webcast this makes it much easier to share enhancements to the 36 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server code and upgrade to new versions of the software e g if you are adding a new page such as a list of allies provide a wrapper script to call it in www cityname but provide the specific details in the local include folder and include it from the wrapper script 37 Chapter 4 Active Software Development Active is a free software project under the GNU Public License http www gnu org also known as copyleft See www active org au source http www active org au source for the latest version of this software You are invited to help develop new features and fix problems Hopefully this chapter will help explain how best to do that This chapter is Revision 1 7 The last update was on Date 2001 05 19 12 47 24 at which time the current release version of active was 1 7 Ocvs 4 1 Contributing to the active software development There is a separate list for discussing and organising the programming of the active software called webcoders To get on it send a blank email to geton webcoders cat org au mailto geton webcoders cat org au Or visit the archive http cat org au lists webcoders
14. The people who posted their personal stories to the web showing the power of open publishing The organisers of the Seattle indymedia centre for linking so many media activists together in a powerful network The ongoing indymedia audience for being creative diverse and inspiring The contributing media activists for continuing to collaborate The indymedia volunteers all around the world who have stretched this dodgy software way beyond what we ever dreamed it would do including translating it into a dozen languages Rabble Rouser for the front page features code Bonnie in NYC USA for various helper scripts John Kawakami for trying to get server side caching improved into something half reasonable The SF Indybay geeks for adding in ratings even if it never got to a state where it could be patched in Idan Sofer for active in the first non latin language Hebrew All the people who have contributed ideas see the wishlist and code see the cvs logs and the CHANGES file If you ve contributed and I ve left you out please let me know and I ll add you in Chapter 1 About Active 1 4 1 Documentation helpers christopher mitchell lt cmitchell macalester edu gt for the section on learning Linux 1 5 About This Guide It s about time we had a place to bring all the doumentation together for active The newest version of this guide can be found at http active org au doc http active org au doc Tip Technical note
15. a picture with a text story a modem quaity realaudio sound piece Chapter 1 About Active with a high quality MP3 for reuse by radio stations a colleciton of pictures of the same event a video with a freeze frame image management page for editing linking and removing news facilities to help manage rewriting web addresses for multimedia stored on different servers mirrored and optionally delay linking to stories while they are transferred behind the scenes the summary pages are cached on the server to dramatically increase the number of viewers the web server can deal with if the site gets busy e events calendar calendar presented as either a listing with events about to happen shown first or as a monthly calendar users can add their own events users get a login on the calendar so they can come back and edit or remove them new events can be emailed to an announcements list and a weekly email calendar can also be generated editing users and events that you did not create is fiddly involves hand editing the text databases e groups listings currently very basic display readers can add info about groups they are involved in some details in the form are Australian specific admin page for editing and deleting groups Please see also the wishlist wish 1 3 1 How does active compare to slashdot s code I wrote up a comparison in this email to webcoders Chapter 1 About Active http reflect cat org au
16. allies provide a warpper script to call it in webcast but provide the specific details in the local include folder and include it from the wrapper script There is some pretty reasonable documentation of the calendar script in the calendar Documentation folder unfortunately we haven t updated it to reflect any changes we made to it from the Extropia version 3 5 3 how to setup a new indymedia city Warning These notes assume you already have active running atleast one city on your server They re also out of date Sorry about that Permissions needed to do it e superuser access on fs freespeech org to setup the domain name cityname indymedia org e superuser access on emma turtle to setup the apache virtual web server for cityname indymedia org e a login to the web server to be used turtle with membership of the web group setup with usermod G web lt username gt OR login to emma with membership of the imc group setup with usermod G imc lt username gt 31 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 32 e access to the postgresql database as a user on emma turtle with permissions to create databases setup with createuser lt username gt from a user that has postgres super user access e g the user postgres e the loudeye com login and password one way to get it is given below but only works if you have superuser on emma or turtle On cat each city has its config s
17. ata entryform inc ing stories led process php3 Delete form make_anim mated GIFs not used make_thumb loaded image is new_data process php3 publish php3 refresh php3 article processes data after peopl display routines for front page sum if this is present the de used we can play without stuff show main display routine display linking editing delet edit a story i think this takes entryform inc and in into the fields so a story can be edited the plain form for entering and edit processes actions from the LinkEdit perl script to make ani perl script to make thumbnails if up bigger than say 160x120 press publish publish form hacked version of dis play php3 which creates html files dard out search php3 uploads instead of writing front page to stan search for articles symlink where uploaded images vids sounds get put also i think dis play php3 looks for static html here ery page which is a header that goes on ev 27 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server webcast debug def postgresql table definition webcast def postgresgl table definition webcastd pl daemon which monitors mirroring of au dio video files used for J18 but not for N30 active shared db_class php3 all functions for accessing sql ta ble all sgl queries get logged to local log sql_log active local
18. ate a database for php y n n don t forget to create a database for php where xxx is some userid that isn t going to conflict with a human username id I used 100 because on Debian the userid s for humans start at 1000 Now setup a password for this user e Pick a password for the php user to use when connecting to postgresql for this example I m gonna pick secret Except you should pick one that s not an english word because it s more secure Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server optional Encrypt the password This is good security it means a cracker cannot easily find out the password even with system level access which is good because those passwords might be used in other places a cracker hasn t got access to yet However it s maybe more hassle than it s worth because sometimes as a system admin you might need to find out the password without wanting to reset it and it is only useful for connecting to the database from the local machine unless you open up your database to other machines which is not recommended for beginners Also the active code contains the password in plain text so a cracker can easily find it there if they have a login on the server Anyway the command is makepasswd see below for how to use it echo secret gt tmp phppass makepasswd crypt clearfrom tmp phppass rm tmp phppass secret DpR4hs 6119STI the bit on the left is the crypte
19. cat org au usr local cvsroot Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server CVSP pserver S USER cvs cat org au usr local cvsroot CVSROOT ext cvs cat org au usr local cvsroot export export alias cvsa cvs d SCVSA alias cvsp cvs d SCVSP e proc is a shortcut for searching through the list of running processes by name You can use it to quickly find matching process names or users E g proc apache to find how many apache processes are running e cvsa and cvsp are shortcuts to evs Code Versioning System cvsa is for read only anonymous access to the active CVS server and evsp is for read write access where you have a login and password on cvs cat org au assuming your cat username is the same as your current login Before using either you will need to login the password for anonymous access is blank e g evsa login 3 4 Setting up postgresql for communication with PHP PostgreSQL http www postgresql org is a free software SQL database server When we began programming on active in 1999 it was GPL copyleft but MySQL was not Also PostgreSQL has a richer feature set It also has better bugs increased quirks and decreased speed although things seem to be improving One of the challenges with PostgreSQL is setting it up to communicate with PHP so that web scripts can access information in the database tables So this is how to setup PostgreSQL atleast on a Debian GNU Linux http www d
20. d password Use that instead of secret below e Connect to the default database template and set the password for the php user psql templatel Welcome to the POSTGRESQL interactive sql monitor Please read the file COPYRIGHT for copy right terms of POSTGRESQL PostgreSQL 6 5 3 on i686 pc linux gnu compiled by gcc 2 95 2 type for help on slash commands type q to quit type g or terminate with semicolon to execute query You are currently connected to the database templatel templatel gt up date pg_shadow set passwd secret where usename php UPDATE 1 templatel gt q 19 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 20 e Edit the PostgreSQL security filter to tighten up security so that a password or identity is checked before allowing access and so that access is only offered to people on the same machine as the database etc postgresql pg_hba conf The default debian setup gives users on the local machine access as whatever username they want if they know the right psql options and denies connections from other machines Warning think a good security balance would be to allow local users to connect using their own username without a password or with a different username and a password However haven t figured out how to actually do this my attempts so far at what looks logical seem to fail e Edit the PostgreSQL startup options s
21. databse and multimedia news uploads perl http www perl org scripting including the Time DaysInMonth module from CPAN http www cpan org the ImageMagick program convert is used on the web server to create thumbnails of published images the unix program wget is used for certain page refreshing functions PHP http www php net scripting version 4 x including PHP support for PostgreSQL PostgreSQL http www postgresql org an SQL database version 6 5 x access to a mailing list server such as majordomo http www greatcircle com majordomo or mailman http www gnu org software mailman mailman html for distributing events and news by email or you could use an online service like egroups http www egroups com 14 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server e access to a unix shell for things like a scheduler like unix cron for weekly automatic emailing of event calendars and for creating symbolic links within the web scripts folder e access to a streaming media server currently RealMedia http www real com and MP3 are supported and some sort of mirroring system such as mirrordir active patched version http active org au source mirrordir recommended or rsync e code versioning system CVS if you want to keep up to date with the latest versions or easily contribute your changes to the code back into the project If you ve not heard of some of this software check fresh
22. ebian org system 1 Install these debian packages and their dependencies postgresql postgresql client you want atleast postgresql 6 5 x which is in debian 2 2 stable postgresql 7 x is worth getting if you think your server might get really busy makepasswd needed 17 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 18 to manually make encrypted passwords php4 pgsql now available in debian 2 2 stable Change to the postgres user e g with su postgres or by putting sudo u postgres in front of your command I m going to use sudo because it s cool Make yourself a postgres database admin user createuser your username sudo u postgres createuser your username Enter user s postgres ID gt XXXX Is user your username allowed to create databases y n y Is user your username a superuser y n y WARNING Any user who can add users can also modify the sys tem catalog createuser your username was successfully added where xxxx is your Unix userid you can find that out by running id when you re logged in Now that you are a postgresql superuser you can setup another database user not a Unix user for communication between PostgreSQL and PHP createuser php createuser php Enter user s postgres ID gt xxx Is user php allowed to create databases y n n Is user php a superuser y n n createuser php was successfully added Shall I cre
23. eceseessceceeteseceeeseeseeeeesseeeeeeeees BI 3 5 3 1 How to setup the calendar within an indymedia city 52 3 5 3 2 Things to customise for a new indymedia site eee B5 4 1 Contributing to the active software CevelOpMent ccccseeceeseeeceeeeeeeeeeees Gs A2 KEY COST ON ICCA sirra EE E EE EEEE AOR E cet evens Sabana ea BS 4 3 Code Versioning System sesssesseeeeeeesesssssssssteresessssssseseeseesessssssseseereesssss AO PONIRE E E AT Chapter 1 About Active Active is a set of web software that does multimedia news events and groups listings In this chapter we go into detail about what active is designed to do why it exists and a little bit about this guide too This chapter is Revision 1 6 The last update was on Date 2001 05 19 12 47 24 at which time the current release version of active was 1 7 Ocvs 1 1 About the Active Software The active software creates a set of web pages which allow web surfers to contribute to a shared calendar groups listing and multimedia news with discussion It s designed to be easy to use and easy to read the results It is free software and copyleft http www gnu org It can be run on an entirely free software server active is under ongoing development as the backend for www active org au http www active org au an activist web site in Sydney Australia and indymedia org http www indymedia org a global network of activis
24. es shtml files to ensure a common look for all pages 2 the news and groups listings are programmed using PHP3 web scripting php3 files with PostgreSQL storing the information in a database and multimedia files received using http push from the user s browser and stored in the local filesystem 3 the events calendar is generated using a large Perl script with the database stored in text files This is a heavily modified version of the WebCal script from www extropia com http www extropia com 4 the front page is generated by combining static text with a dynamic headline view of the current events The common graphics headers and footers for the site are in the local include and local images folder The configuration files are also all in the local folder 13 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server This chapter is Revision 1 8 The last update was on Date 2001 06 11 04 57 53 at which time the current release version of active was 1 7 Ocvs 3 1 what software it depends on Currently the active software depends on a handful of software installed on a web server if there is a minimum required version for the software it is shown in brackets a unix operating system has been assumed e g linux a web server we use apache http www apache org with access to server side includes shtml and perl and PHP plus local write access to certain folders for storing the calendar text
25. files go in the one messy folder That includes text files for stories longer than 8192 bytes a PostgreSQL hard limit on transaction length warning postgresql can trash your database if you throw long queries at it Use VACUUM to recover it It also of course includes images their automatically generated thumbnails realaudio mp3 s realvideo etc The new_data process php3 script which processes the publish php3 form makes sure any new files get a unique name We got several hundred megs during N30 including some very big movie files encoded at multiple quality levels in RealMedia e pushing files realmedia images to different servers has to be handled outside these scripts because it varies a lot depending on what setup security etc the mirror servers have rsync is I think the absolute bees knees for mirroring files because it handles a lot of niggles automatically but you can use FTP to push files as well Pd still like to see some sort of wrapper for both rsync and ftp that writes a lock file so that if you have a short wait time between mirroring e g 10 minutes a second copy doesn t start up during a long transfer You could also use a daemon but I had trouble with one daemon I wrote in perl webcastd pl mysteriously dying cron seems much more reliable 4 3 Code Versioning System 40 Many people from around the world are contributing to the active software This takes some co ordination We use the Code Versioni
26. ia Perl These depend on text include files text static images see the local include and local images folders databases and SQL databases PostgreSQL More detail on what you will need a server machine we use Linux www linux org on a Pentium you could probably use any Unix with web server software we use apache www apache org add index shtml index cgi and index php3 to the line in your web server config specifying the default web page for a folder when the user only gives the filename e g active org au news server side includes turned on for the active folder CGI scripts turned on for cgi files in the active scripts folder the right permissions symbolic links and folders see the Makefiles the PostgreSQL database with access via TCP IP enabled for localhost connections i e an internet link from your web server direct back to your web server the permissions for this can be tricky we set up a special PostgreSQL user then GRANTed it permissions to read and modify the database you also need to tell PostgreSQL seperately that locahost internet access is OK and set a password other wise it s off by default look in the news news def groups groups def and webcast webcast def files for table definitions within the active database 21 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server e the PHP software installed as a loadable apache module you might be able to use it via a CGI script we haven t te
27. ils If you re running Debian Linux you can get a lot of useful tools by installing the packages sgmltools 2 docbook docbook stylesheets and cygnus stylesheets For editing SGML I ve found using emacs in psgml mode is the most convenient because it helps you insert valid tags in the right context and will verify your tags on the spot It even promises to have colour syntax highlighting but I haven t figured out how to get that to work yet I had a little trouble getting xemacs to work with psgml until I upgraded to a newer version of emacs21 basesupport version 2000 10 23 1 http packages debian org testing editors xemacs21 basesupport html available in Debian testing Useful emacs tricks for SGML editing include e the first time you work on the document load active sgml and use the menu DTD gt Save Parsed DTD to save act ive ced which makes work much quicker and allows the subfiles to be edited in SGML mode e Ctrl C Ctrl E inserts valid tag pairs in a given context and Ctrl C Ctrl R wraps selected text with a tag and both have Tab completion for the SGML tags which is lovely also handy is Ctrl C which finishes an open tag e use Tab to indent tagged text to show the nesting level and Meta Q to fill or word wrap paragraphs the Meta key took me a while to figure out Ese always works but sometimes you can use Alt or the left hand Windows key Turn on auto 45 Appendix A Editing This Guide 46 word wrapp
28. immediately on the web pages some people consider this a feature others a bug information is clearly presented designed to print out clearly does not use fancy browser options like Java Javascript or frames so it works with older equipment and also with software for people with disabilities see www useit com http www useit com for writings about this sort of design philosophy designed so it can be set up for independent use in different cities even on the same server but no ability yet to share info between those web sites colours headers footers and graphics can be customised for a specific city installation without breakign the ability to upgrade to new verisons later basic syndication news and events details can be delivered in raw text for reuse and reformatting on other web sites the package is free software everything you need to run it on a web server is also free software news webcast users can add their own news articles contributed stories can be text images sound or video all published and managed using a simple web page form basic ability for readers to add comments underneath stories any new stories go immediately into the summary view of the news which can be included in the front page of the website if images are bigger than a given size a thumbnail is generated for display in the summary view related stories can be linked so that they are grouped together in the summary display e g
29. ing using Meta X auto fill mode e explore the menus I ve found the following especially useful SGML gt Validate you will be prompted for the file to validate you want to validate from the top file active sgml Markup gt Tag region tags an existing area of text To compile SGML into a set of HTML files you can use db2html d SPWD active dsl active sgml Note that you can edit active ds1 to change how the document is displayed or printed e g how many levels to show in the table of contents what background colour to use etc One common task in dealing with SGML is converting an existing document from HTML into SGML More specifically we need to go from HTML to SGML DocBook I ve found a couple of different ways to do this e Using the html2sgml perl script you can go from HTML to SGML LinuxDoc To get from LinuxDoc to DocBook both SGML variants with different Document Type Definitions DTDs you can use sgmltools b 1d2db e I just found a much newer package called html2db http freshmeat net projects html2db that promises to convert straight from HTML to SGML DocBook This uses openjade which is not in Debian 2 2 but it is in Debian testing amp unstable I found I could get something half decent to work using jade jade t sgml d html2db html2db dsl lt filename html gt filename sgml where htm12db ds1 is from html2db However this leaves the gt tag dangling over the end of the lines I used this perl
30. list Let s say their email address is someone activist org Then you ll need to use cron the Unix system scheduler to generate the calendar at regular intervals Get a shell prompt on the server that s running the active calendar then type in export EDITOR pico crontab e use another editor apart from pico if you like of course Then paste in 3 lines like the following 018 0 cd www cityname calendar usr bin perl www cityname calendar index cgi dis play mail_text days 15 mail s Cityname Events someone activist org Note that the sloshes must be the very last character on the first 2 lines The above example will send out a calendar every Sunday day zero 5th number Ist line at 6pm 18 00 Ist two numbers Ist line using the active calendar installed in www cityname calendar The calendar will have events for the next two weeks 15 days and will be sent to someone activist org The subject line on the email will be Cityname Events Note that you can also get events emailed to someone as announcements when they are entered into the website That email address is set in local calendar calendar setup Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 3 5 3 2 Things to customise for a new indymedia site All file paths are relative to Avww cityname e local appear inc defines the colour scheme for the site e local include has a bunch of files tha
31. lists webcoders msg01464 html 1 4 Thankyou Gabrielle Kuiper for the energy and the name behind the launch of active sydney http active org au sydney in 1998 99 The active collective for organising active org au trusting our audience and exploring open publishing Cameron Shorter and Matthew Arnison for initial programming on the website calendar and groups listings including generalising it just enough to be used by other cities as free software open source xchange http www xchange anarki net anarchist BBS in Melbourne for demonstrating so quickly how open source can autonomously spread Selena Sol for the calendar code we started from and for granting our request to relicense it under the GNU copyleft GPL Richard Stallman for suggesting we chase Selena about that option The cat http www cat org au crew for the J18 webcast http www j18 cat org au June 18 1999 when we first designed and used the webcast software cat is also where active is hosted Andrew Nicholson for programming the first version of the news and then the webcast software and continued contributions to mutations thereof Matthew Arnison for dodgy hacks on the server side caching and multimedia support The late EMU technology cafe Sydney for lots of lovely vegan meals and positive vibe a great place to have meetings and geek out We miss you The activist warehouse in St Peters Sydney a home base for cat and sydney indymedia org http
32. local but do include changes to template or template_imce as these are the defaults for new active and indymedia cities Then checkout a temporary workarea that includes all these folders E g for release 1 7 0 the folders active active shared active webcast active template_imc active doc active source have all had changes since the last release so in my home folder I ran cvsa co l active cd active cvsa co d shared active shared cvsa co d webcast active webcast cvsa co d template_imc active template_imc cvsa co d doc active doc cvsa co d source active source You can then generate a ChangeLog using cvs2cl pl http www red bean com cvs2cl cvs2cl pl usermap usermap gmt cvs2cl pl uses the file usermap to convert cat login names used for write permission to CVS into email addresses Have a look in the ChangeLog to see if any of the latest changes are by new people not listed in usermap if so add them in and re run cvs2cl pl as above Chapter 4 Active Software Development Since the ChangeLog shows the newest changes first you can select the first part of the file up until the previous release which will be marked with a CVS comment like this shared release version txt release version 1 62 of active The cvs2cl website has some good notes on how to write good CVS commit messages http www red bean com cvs2cl changelogs html with the ChnageLog in mind CHANGES You can use the changelog
33. meat http freshmeat net for details 3 2 Learning Linux For many people indymedia is their first experience with Linux Here are some good places to start learning about the Linux way of doing things e A good primer for general linux knowledge appears to be this Linux Tutorial http www linuxdoc org LDP gs node5 html That primer is part of the Linux Documentation Project http www linuxdoc org a great place to look for FAQs HOWTOs and online books about Linux For something on paper check out the excellent Linux and Advanced Linux Pocketbooks http www pocketbooks net au e A crucial tool for remote administration is ssh It allows you to execute typed commands on the server interactively You might be more familiar with its ancestor telnet ssh is simply an encrypted version on telnet and therefore much better for server security You can find more information about ssh including free software servers and clients for various operating systems at the Open SSH http www openssh org website e You might know ftp but unfortunately it s not very secure because it sends your 15 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server password in plain text over the net Check out the secure alternative in this introduction to sftp and scp http www linuxgazette com issue64 dellomodarme html e For tips on general Linux server security check out this quick reference card http www linuxdoc org LDP
34. ndow title and bookmark label i e the lt title gt tag edit local webcast webcast inc e local webcast uploads is where uploaded multimedia stories end up including text stories longer than 6K images and image thumbnails You may need to make sure this folder gets mirrored onto your multimedia server e g a realmedia server e major known problem with timezones the times shown on the website are currently set by which web server is being used emma is on US east coast time and turtle is on US mountain time Advanced users You can edit local webcast webcast inc to change the way these include files are used or add new ones see the top and bottom functions which get called anywhere a page is being generated in the webcast code E g index php3 symlink to gt front php3 gt which then calls top title function defined in local webcast webcast inc which writes the HTML header HTML BODY tags then includes e local include top1 inc e the page heading title as passed to the top function e local include top2 inc e local webcast cache frontN html which is page N of a dynamically generated list of summaries of the stories you can refresh these by calling webcast refresh php3 from your web browser don t edit them manually as your changes will get overwritten e bottom function defined in local webcast webcast inc which includes e local include bottom inc and then writes the HTML footer BODY and HT
35. ng System CVS software to help us manage multiple versions of the code and to make it easier for more than one person to work on the code at the same time Chapter 4 Active Software Development CVS takes a little getting used to However it is very powerful and allows us to be much more effective as a group I want to use this section to write up a lot of specific details about how to use CVS for programming on active Meanwhile I just ran across an excellent description of CVS http lists debian org debian devel 0102 msg00824 html from a Debian developer Scroll down 3 pages to get to the part of the email that talks about CVS It looks like that project uses a very similar approach to CVS I ll be using his description as a starting point for writing this section You can browse the active code CVS tree online at cvs cat org au http www cvs cat org au 4 4 Releasing a new version of active The latest version of the code is available to anyone at any time through CVS However it is useful to mark particular versions with a release number so we can refer to them more easily and to help document changes in the code It can be tricky to decide when a new release is needed The general free software approach is release early release often So if in doubt it probably doesn t hurt to release although it does take a few moments to do In fact that s even more motivation for more frequent releases the longer we leave i
36. o that it listens for TCP IP connections even though we are only connecting from the localhost PHP only knows how to connect over TCP IP sudo vi etc postgresql postmaster init Uncomment the PGALLOWTCPIP option and set it to yes so that the whole line reads PGALLOWTCPIP yes Then restart postgresql sudo etc init d postgresql restart 4 Setup a database for your active city website createdb active_cityname 5 Run the database definition scripts for the parts of active you want to use e g psql e active_cityname lt www active cityname webcast webcast def This creates the tables indexes and sets access permissions for PHP The SQL database definition files in active assume you are using the username php to connect PostgreSQL with PHP If you are using a different username you ll need to edit the GRANT lines at the bottom Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 6 Test it works from the command line using psql u active_cityname postgresql version 6 5 x or psql U php active_cityname postgresql version 7 x 3 5 Active installation notes We designed this software to be easy for people to use on the web and also to be easy for us to code I think we may have achieved these things but ended up with something a little harder to install The top folder is designed to be the top of the active web site So index shtml is the front page Then there are various scripts inline via PHP3 and CGI v
37. o the browser it dumps them in files called local webcast cache frontN html where N is the page number this saves the web server thrash ing when we get lots of visitors 25 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server 26 active org au dev maffew active webcast front php3 page N wraps the lo cal webcast cache frontN html files with the header and footer active org au dev maffew active webcast search php3 searching currently very specific to seattle needs head ers and footers generalised to point at local and date specifica tion made more general active org au dev maffew active webcast publish php3 enter new stories or click on link to link edit delete existing ones i suggest adding a few dummy sto ries to get a feel for how this works active org au dev maffew active webcast display php3 led y story edit mode can link related items here g a still im age to a text story about the same event can delete items needs a few added features ability to un delete show a page of stories at a time instead of all of them script files layout slightly out of date active webcast auto_add php3 not sure Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server cast_class inc maries or articles debug bug database tables are ing on the live site display php3 front page summaries ing led edit_webcast php3 entry_munger php3 serts d
38. only needs to be changed when a story is added edited or deleted we keep a copy here to save time in serving the front page To force a refresh of this file say if your database crashed and you recovered it i find PostgreSQL s command vacuum very handy in this situation by the way access the script news refresh_front php3 from your web browser local news uploads for the multimedia news this is where we store images sounds and videos that people upload Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server local webcast e webcast setup local webcast cache e again because the index pages involve quite complex SQL queries we cache a copy here between story changes local webcast uploads e for the multimedia items this is where we store images sounds and videos that people upload local log e any logs currently just sql_log which lists all SQL queries made by the news and webcast code together with a datestamp Some tech details on the webcast folder web browser start points active org au dev maffew active webcast display php3 display front page sum maries does database query and HTML construction on the fly also displays articles al ways done on the fly at the moment using Particle _id N where N is the database article ID active org au dev maffew active webcast refresh php3 calls the above code in a special mode so that in stead of outputting the page t
39. r HTML BODY tags then includes e local include top 1 inc e the page heading title as passed to the top function e local include top2 inc e local webcast cache frontN html which is page N of a dynamically generated list of summaries of the stories you can refresh these by calling webcast refresh php3 from your web browser don t edit them manually as your changes will get overwritten e bottom function defined in local webcast webcast inc which includes e local include bottom inc and then writes the HTML footer BODY and HTML tags the local images folder has the logo that goes in the top right hand corner and some other images we use you will want to set the passwords in local password php3 local calendar calendar setup will definitely need attention make sure you change the announce email address local webcast uploads is where uploaded multimedia stories end up including text stories longer than 6K You may need to make sure this folder gets mirrored onto your multimedia server e g a realmedia server Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server e please put anything specific to the local city in the local folder somehow and only put code that would be applicable to any installation of active into the other folders such as webcast this makes it much easier to share enhancements to the code and upgrade to new versions of the software e g if you are adding a new page such as a list of
40. sted this e the PHP loadable module that lets you talk to the PostgreSQL database server 3 5 1 What s in which folder Need to check if this is still up to date See the file layout diagrams http process indymedia org tech active files for more clues e top level folder active the front page wrapper scripts index cgi and index shtml index shtml should have precedence check your web server configs if it doesn t e calendar the main calendar perl script index cgi uses forms to let people add their own events also daystogo pl and hourstogo pl which use some of the calendar libraries to provide a plain text countdown to an event which can then be included in a front splash page or something updated using cron calendar Documentation the docs that came with WebCal before we heavily hacked it e calendar Library some libraries that the calendar script depends on e groups code for the groups listings uses forms to let people add info about their group 22 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server news e code for the news webcast multimedia version of the news specialised for a webcast of a live event shared e shared code which both the news and webcast code uses at the moment just the code which handles SQL queries local all the configurations or local info for a given city or site using the active code should be in here To get a new active site up and going
41. t the longer it takes to write up the release notes Specifically I think a new release is needed when e alot of changes have been made to the code without introducing signifigant new bugs or surprises to people upgrading atleast not undocumented surprises however if you re not sure whether the version works or not a release is still often a good idea because if you wait then new features may get added with new bugs before the existing bugs are fixed e there is an important new feature or bugfix e some time has elapsed since the last release 41 Chapter 4 Active Software Development 42 e the database schema has changed this should be indicated by increasing the second number in the version number e g 1 7 3 to 1 8 0 Because we are always guessing when is a good time to make a release some releases might be bad That s part of open source hopefully our documentation can highlight which versions are good which are bad and which introduce features or bugfixes These are the steps I go through when releasing a new version of the code 1 ChangeLog Ideally you could just generate a ChangeLog straight away However as of April 2001 there are corrupt headers in some of the files in the active CVS repository So the workaround is to lookup the archives of the webcoders cvs list to see which folders in the code have changed since the last release ignore changes to city specific local folders e g active sydney
42. t get used to make up the pages and give them a consistent look e local include bottom inc included at the bottom of every page e local include cities inc used in the sidebar to list other indymedia sites usually is a symlink pointing to www cities inc e local include feature inc not used in the indymedia style e local include front inc not used in the indymedia style e local include howto publish html the text above the form on the publish page e local include imcfront header inc the text at the top of the front page e local include imcfront inc the text in the middle column of the front page usually used to list featured stories e local include sidebar inc the sidebar that appears on every page including the front page e local include top1 inc not used in the default indymedia style but if you put something in here it will show up before the page numbers in the main body of every page e local include top2 inc not used in the default indymedia style but if you put something in here it will show up after the page numbers in the main body of every page e the local images folder has the logo that goes in the top left hand corner local images imcfront gif and the banner across the top of the front page local images imcfront banner gif e you will want to set the story administration password in local password php3 35 Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server e to change the wi
43. t news sites It s primarily designed for busy activists but by tailoring the text and graphics you could probably use it in a bunch of different situations See www active org au source http www active org au source for the latest version of this software 1 2 Goals and Context This is what I think the goals are We want to help activists organise and motivate and inform We want to create a website that s a positive heartland for activists a sense of place a sense of achievement and reflection and vibrant and open enough that it attracts people who are interested in actvism and practical and focussed enough that all sorts of people in our audience dream up solutions to local and global problems and get out there and make them Chapter 1 About Active happen A nice side effect is that we also become a source for stories for the wider media We want to help people develop the art of story telling and debate We want to be a catalyst for those stories to reach into other media parts of the city and the planet not touched by the web We want to break down barriers and encourage the flow of information from people with both good and bad stories to tell to the people we know are out there who want to hear them We are using the internet because it s cheap it allows anyone connected to contribute it s global as well as local and it feeds into and out of other media And it s fun too It s free software http www gn
44. to write a summary of the changes for people who don t have time to read through it all It s important to highlight new features bugfixes known bugs database schema changes and special steps needed to upgrade Paste the summary and the ChangeLog since the last release into active source CHANGES then commit that change to CVS Login into the cat CVS server cvs cat org au and run the actual release script cd www active cvs update source CHANGES release x y z where x y z is the version number to release e g 1 7 0 we can t use 1 7 0 here because CVS release tags can t have dots in them The release script does a few things e Opens source CHANGES in vi for you to edit in these instructions we ve already done that so you can just quit vi using q enter e Writes the release version into shared release version txt then commits the changed release version txt and source CHANGES to CVS e Tags the current version of all source and template files in CVS with the tag relx y z e Exports a copy of the code and makes a tar file copies it into the source folder so people can download it Writes the current tar gz symbolic link to point at the 43 Chapter 4 Active Software Development 44 new version e Reminds you to announce the new release on webcoders and freshmeat You can repeat the release script with the same verison number if you got something small wrong that you need to fixup Just quit
45. tored in CVS separately from the main code so that it is easy to setup test verisons of a city s configuration on other machines or in different folders on the same machine To setup a new indymedia city you would do this on stallman cd www active cvs toplevel new_city_imc cityname www active cvs this pulls across the shared code in www active cvs cityname and new city config using the template_imc indymedia style via anonymous CVS from cat and sets up a symlink folder www cityname which will be the entry point from the web plus a few other things Then edit the DNS and the apache web server configuration to add the virtual server The virtual server should point to www cityname Finally you will need to manually ftp into centerstage loudeye com see usr local sbin pushtoeye for the password but you need root access to read usr local sbin pushtoeye because it has a password in it Anyway you will need to ftp into there and create the cityname folder and a metafiles cityname folder which is needed for MP3 and image hosting 3 5 3 1 How to setup the calendar within an indymedia city If you have a default indymedia style install of active you can easily activate the web calendar S cd www cityname ln s calendar Chapter 3 Setting up and maintaining active on a web server Test it by running cd calendar index cgi if it fails with index cgi Can t locate Time DaysInMonth pm in IN
46. trol e Looking for a local group campaigning on cycling housing indigenous justice Chapter 1 About Active Over a hundred such groups have contributed their own details to active sydney http active org au sydney e Of course there s a lot of fantastic projects doing these kinds of things The ones above are just some examples of ones tht are using the active software Here s some other approaches e news tao ca http news tao ca protest net http protest net damn tao ca http damn tao ca e www schnews org uk http www schnews org uk e www activistsandiego org http www activistsandiego org San Francisco Bay Area Progressive Calendar http www emf net cheetham cal html Toby from Schnews helped me Matthew draw up a very personal journey through the roots and shoots of the active software roots pdf no doubt I left out some huge influences that should be in there People for Global Action http www agp org should definitely be in there And Next 5 Minutes http www n5m org a series of three tactical media meetings in Amsterdam 1 3 Features Here s some specifics on what the active software does As of version 1 41 April 2000 e overall design e easy to contribute info using web page forms if you can use hotmail you can contribute to active Chapter 1 About Active open publishing there is no editorial approval process items submitted over the web show up
47. u org so that anyone can take it and reuse and adapt it and contribute back in too if they want I wrote a rant about activist webcasting and how it s important to have open publishing frozen media nuggets and free software http cat org au cat webcast html See also this quick and dirty explanation of what free software is freesoftware txt How about some examples e Money from the rich countries is tied to privatisation for poor country social services after a sell off the price of water in Bolivia rises higher than Washington DC USA people living there can describe the experience direct to activists worldwide dc indymedia org http dc indymedia org as part of the corporate globalisation protests on April 16 2000 e A local community radio station is looking for volunteers a dozen of the people who show up at the first training session say they found out about it on the www active org au sydney http active org au sydney events calendar e November 30 1999 and the corporate media is doing the usual snow job on protests in Seattle Giving the lie to patronising mainstream coverage the Independent Media Centre seattle indymedia org http seattle indymedia org brings to light the brutal violence of police the passion and creativity of the protestors and the ultimate success in shutting down the World Trade Organisation Pictures sound video and hot text circle the globe independent of centralised corporate con
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