Bixi is the new community bike service here in Montreal. Lots of brewhaha around launchtime, but to me, the really annoying shortcoming of the system so far was not being able to check the status of stations on the go.

According to a message I read on the facebook group for bixi a few weeks ago, there is “no plan to provide an API, iphone app or mobile access to the map of bixi stations”. That’s rather silly, knowing that the users will want to know, in real time and on the go, whether they can get or return a bike nearby.

I’m too lazy to build a real iphone app over the week-end, but I wanted to prove that it doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars to provide bixi users mobile access to the status of the stations.

30 minutes and about as many lines of python later, I had a working hack to include a map of all stations in google earth, google maps or the map application on my iphone.

iPhone Instructions

Here’s how to use it on the iphone (or networked iPod Touch):

Disclaimer: I built this using only publicly available data – not a public, official API, though. If the powers-that-be at bixi decide they don’t like it, or change the way they organise their data, or any other silly move, I’ll have to pull the plug on this little hack. In the meantime, I intend to use it and provide it for free. Enjoy.

Using subversion for the theme code itself did help us test changes to the theme scripts and style before pushing them to production, but the content itself was not duplicated: the development instance of the blog had some fairly antiquated content, while the production instance had all the latest article.

Synchronising the content from the production to the development server was not as easy as simply dumping and reimporting the whole SQL database. Be aware that if you import a whole WordPress database, you also import some field setup that will cause unwanted redirects.

Suppose you dump the wordpress database for http://www.myblog.example.com/ into a duplicate instance at http://dev.myblog.example.com/. Try accessing http://dev.myblog.example.com/ and wordpress will automatically redirect you to http://www.myblog.example.com/, which it thinks is the right URI for your blog. What to do? Go to the WordPress Dashboard and edit the settings? Not going to happen, since trying to access http://dev.myblog.example.com/wp-admin/ will also redirect you to http://www.myblog.example.com/.

The solution I found was to:

1. Make sure you use separate databases for your production and development blog. This is much safer, anyway. Also, make sure your databases and files are properly backed up before attempting the following hack.

   Disable all plugins before the sync. Especially if you are using wp-cache, disable it. You’ve been warned.

2. Dump the database from your production blog into the separate database for your development blog. With mysql, this will look like:

   mysqldump PROD_DATABASE_NAME -h PROD_DATABASE_HOST -u PROD_DATABASE_USER -p > wordpress_dump.sql

   then

   mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p < wordpress_dump.sql

   (You will be prompted for the database password both times. Make sure to replace the placeholders PROD_DATABASE_HOST with actual values for your setup.

3. Edit the development database to tell wordpress the location of the dev blog. With MySQL again:

   echo 'update wp_options set option_value="http://staging.address.com/" where option_name="home";' | mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p

   and

   echo 'update wp_options set option_value="http://staging.address.com/wordpress" where option_name="siteurl";' | mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p

This worked for me, in two very distinct configurations last week. Any way this could have been done in a less hack-ish way? Tell me in the comments.