Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I was reading Eric Sink’s post about his custom blog tool that he, and only he, uses. The reason no one else could use it even if they wanted to, is that its full of bugs and usability quirks that only he knows about, hell, he only runs it by firing up Visual Studio and running the project in debug mode!

That got me to thinking about the MeWare that I’ve got. I’ve got a server at home that I use for my version control, I host Subversion on it, so I can have all my little projects in versioning and use it as a weak web/database server.  The server is a PIII 667 MHz Dell with 128 MB of RAM, so its not exactly a powerhouse. It seems like everytime I remote desktop into the server from work or my other machine at home, the server ends up dropping the wireless connection, so I get booted off when I’m trying to setup a new Subversion repository.  So, to circumvent the problem of remote desktop, I made a small Subversion admin web page.  Basically the page allows me to create a new Subversion repository by specifying the name of the repository. Heres a little screenshot:

I just enter in the name of repository and check the box if I want my tool to automatically create a tree structure in the new repository and I’m all set!

The tool makes some assumptions about the server setup, namely the location of the svn.exe and svnadmin.exe files, default repository usernames and password to create the initial tree setup, and the permissions necessary to create folders, files and execute commands on the server.

While this isn’t as ‘custom’ as Eric’s app, it just reminded me of my most recent custom app that I made for myself. Whats the most custom app you’ve made for your own use? I would think it’d be hard to beat the restrictions that Eric’s has