Then I discovered something that made me say “Yes, this is it”. That something was Octopress. As a developer, I am comfortable doing things on the command line, performing builds and deploys. This is exactly the type of user Octopress targets. In fact, here is a quote from the Octopress documentation:

First, I want to stress that Octopress is a blogging framework for hackers. You should be comfortable running shell commands and familiar with the basics of Git. If that sounds daunting, Octopress probably isn’t for you.

Now that I had decided on using Octopress, I next needed to figure out where to host it. One of the services I have been hearing a lot about that I have been wanting to play with is EngineYard, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to try them out as a potential home for my blog. In checking the Octopress documentation, they list several deployment options but none of them are EngineYard. So, here’s how I managed to deploy my Octopress blog to EngineYard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud.

Step 1: Setup a Github account if you don’t already have one

The documentation is your friend here. https://help.github.com/articles/signing-up-for-a-new-github-account

Step 2: Setup a new Github repository

https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo

Step 3: Setup Octopress

Simply follow the steps at the Octopress website to get setup. You can ignore the “Next Steps” section at the bottom as that is basically what I am going to go through.

Step 4: Add Github as a remote repository

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git remote add github ssh://git@github.com/{your Github username}/{repo name from step 6}.git

example:
git remote add github ssh://git@github.com/pmeth/methlog.git

Step 5: Create a new blog post

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rake new_post["Post Title"]

Step 6: Generate the static pages

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rake generate

Step 7: Remove the public directory from the .gitignore file

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grep -v ^public$ .gitignore > .gitignore2 && mv .gitignore2 .gitignore

Step 8: Commit your generated blog

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git add -A && git commit -m 'writing first blog post'

Step 9: Push your blog up to Github

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git push github master

Step 10: Sign up for EngineYard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud

https://login.engineyard.com/signup/orchestra?locale=en

Step 11: Deploy an App

Click the button to Deploy an Orchestra PHP Application. The free one is sufficient for now, but if you decide you like the service or need to use some of the advanced features, you should consider signing up for their paid service.

When setting up the App, you will be asked for your app name (this will become the subdomain if using the Free account), your Github public repo url, the branch name and the index file. Make sure the index file is public/index.html then click Launch App.

After a minute or two of waiting, EngineYard should have pulled down your blog from Github and launched it on their servers for you to enjoy. The Orchestra control panel will give you a link to the website, which is labelled “Public Hostname”. You can click on it to view your newly created blog.

To make any changes to your blog you simply make changes to the appropriate page under source/_posts, run rake generate, commit your changes then git push github master. After a few minutes, EngineYard will sense the updates, and automatically apply the changes.

That’s it.

The nice thing about hosting your blog on EngineYard is that if you write a popular blog post that gets “Slashdotted” or makes it to the front page of Hackernews, EngineYard will automatically scale up to meet the demand (note this feature is not available on free apps) and your blog won’t take down your server. When the traffic dies down, it will automatically scale back down again.

First I want to go over some background of how the idea for the conference came about and how I got involved. This post may be a bit lengthy but hopefully it is an enjoyable read.

I have been programming PHP for about 10 years and I had been organizing a meetup group called the East Toronto Web Design Group since 2006, so I knew what it was like to participate in a community. However it was not until early 2011 that I started attending PHP meetups. This is mainly because Toronto had never had a good PHP meetup group until the GTA PHP User Group came into existence.

From the time I attended my first meeting with GTA PHP I was blown away by the size of the group, the knowledge level of the attendees and the quality of the speakers. I had held several good meetings with the Web Design group, but I guess the PHP topics were more up my alley. Rapidly I grew more interested in attending the PHP meetups than organizing the Web Design ones, and eventually I stepped down as organizer of the East Toronto Web Design group and volunteered to be one of the organizers of the GTA PHP group.

In late 2011, with a renewed interest in PHP and my eyes newly open to the fact that indeed there was a PHP community in Toronto I started seeking out ways that I could live, learn and talk about PHP and software development in general. I started using Twitter and started following all the interesting PHP people I could find. I started listening to podcasts on my drive in to work. I listened to the Pragmatic Programmers’ Podcast, Cal Evans’ Voices of the Elephpant, Manuel Lamos’ Lately in PHP, EngineYard’s Cloud Out Loud especially the Liz Naramore episodes, Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler’s /dev/hell, The Changelog and The Dev Show (note, I have just about listened to every episode of those shows so need more material. If you can recommend something else to me in the comments it would be great). Even though several of them are Ruby centric and I don’t speak Ruby, I have thoroughly enjoyed all of these Podcasts.

Through going to the meetups, following people on Twitter and listening to the podcasts I became more and more interested in going to a developer conference for the first time. I looked around and was surprised to find that there were no PHP conferences happening in Toronto. The closest one I could find was Confoo in Montreal which is about a 5 hour drive.

Since conferences, hotels and travel are not free, I asked my manager at the time whether the company would pay for me to go to Confoo since it was something that was relevant to my career. I was told that if the conference were happening in Toronto they would have paid, but since it was in Montreal I would have to pay for it myself. This sucked, but I really wanted to go so I bought my ticket anyway and took the train down to Montreal with Guilherme Blanco whom I knew from the meetup group.

On the train I talked with Guilherme about the fact that it would be great if there was a conference in Toronto. He agreed.

I won’t go into too much detail about Confoo because there is too much to tell but let’s just say I had a great time, met many really great people and heard some fantastic talks. I was especially surprised and delighted by the fact that many of the speakers were world renowned builders of tools and products that are used by millions of people, yet they were very approachable and happy to chat, hang out and drink a beer with me. I attribute a lot of that atmosphere to the organizers of Confoo, Yann Larrivee and Anna Filina and I cannot say enough how deeply I respect them for organizing such an incredible event and for their tireless efforts to further the programming community in Canada.

While I was at Confoo it became clear to me that someone had to bring a conference like this to Toronto. At the time I didn’t realize it was going to be me. Instead I was pitching the idea to people hoping that they would take it on and do it and I would offer my full support. A lot of people expressed interest in seeing a conference in Toronto, but no one really stepped up and offered to run it. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised seeing that there were only a small handful of people I met there who were actually from Toronto.

All too soon, Confoo ended and I returned to my life in Toronto, but the thought of a conference in Toronto would not leave my mind. At the next meetup I brought up the idea with Chris Hartjes and he thought it would be great and even said he would help out if I wanted to do it.

I still hadn’t made up my mind to move forward with a conference until a week or two later Jeremy Cook mentioned on Twitter that he was interested in doing some sort of PHP conference. Chris picked up on his tweet and mentioned that I was talking about doing one, so after some back and forth tweets and emails I went out to Guelph (which is about 1.5 hours from Toronto) to meet with Jeremy and attend a Guelph PHP Meetup. While there I ran into Marco Tabini of PHP Architect, who coincidentally was one of the organizers of php|works in 2006, the last PHP conference held in Toronto. I got some good advice from Marco and hashed out some details with Jeremy. When I got back to Toronto I emailed Chris and filled him in and together Jeremy, Chris and I decided we were going to start a conference.

True North PHP was born.

I hope you enjoyed this reflection as much as I enjoyed thinking back and remembering a few of the great people who may not even realize they inspired me to do more and help foster this great community. Please take some time to share your thoughts in the comments below and let me know if there is anything else related to the conference you would like me to write about in the upcoming weeks.