John Evdemon

Keep It Simple...

Keep it simple stupid I haven't created a new Twitter app in years. The new process requires you to apply for a dev account. Before getting a dev account you must describe your intended use of your dev account to Twitter. Apparently the approval process is so slow and tedious that people are actually selling pre-approved Twitter dev accounts. Unbelievable.

Most open source docs suck

Lost

Pro tip: if you're an open source developer you need to ensure the installation instructions for your product are well-written and accurate. How do you expect someone to adopt your product if they can't install or configure it?

I finally got my blog updated to the latest version of Known. It's taken me a while because most of the "official" docs focused on details that I never needed to worry about. Installing the latest version of Known is MUCH simpler than the docs would lead you to believe. I'm posting the directions here in case I need to re-install in the future. I hope this helps someone else that might be struggling to follow the official directions for installing Known.

Set up the database
Go to cPanel and choose the MySQL Database Wizard icon.
Now you're going to be creating a database for your website and a user for your database.
You may want to write down the details that you choose here, because you're going to need to refer back to them a little later.
In the database wizard, give your database a name. It should have a database prefix listed. Mine is evdemon1_. I named my database "known" for clarity, but you can choose anything that you want.
Next, you need to create a user by setting a username and a password in the wizard.
Once the database and the database user have been set up, you need to add them to the database. Select "All Privileges" for now to give your new user all of the database privileges.
Log into your hoster and go to cPanel...Terminal
Navigate to your public_html folder
Clone from github: git clone https://github.com/idno/known.git
Go back to cPanel and go to Domains..Redirects
Change the redirect for your domain to point to the warmup folder under public_html
Navigate to the URL of your website. Your URL should forward to yourdomain.com/warmup/ and you should see a Known screen that says "Let's get started."
After you click the button, you should be on a requirements page.
This page is a check to make sure your space meets the requirements for Known.
Known needs PHP 5.4 or higher to work, you can set this in cPanel if needed:
In CPanel, navigate to ntPHPSelectorFrom the folder list there, choose public_html
Select PHP 5.4 (or whatever version Known needs)
On the requirements page, green items are good and red items indicate that something isn't compatible. If you see a message that says it can't detect Apache mod_rewrite, you can continue anyway. Click the "Hooray!" button to move on.
Now it's time to enter the database details that you recently set up.
First, name your new website. This will show up in the navigation of your site.
Next, enter in your database name (with the prefix), the database username (with the prefix), and the password. You can leave the field that says "localhost" as is.
Under the section for "Your upload directory" leave the field as is.
If you didn't enter in the correct database name, username, or password, you'll get an error message saying that it can't connect to the database.
If this is the case, you'll need to go back and enter in the correct details.
Create user account
Now you should see a screen asking you to create a new user account. This will be your site's admin account.
Fill out your details and make sure you include a relevant email address. Site notifications will be sent there.
Once you've registered a new user account, you have an opportunity to fill out your profile.
You can upload an image, add in a short bio, and include some of your websites. If you don't want to fill this out now, you can always come back and add these details in your site later.
Once you've saved your user profile, you can start using your new Known site.