Entries tagged mephisto

Sorry to everybody on Planet Debian who have been forced to see a lot of older posts of mine.

I switched from Typo to Mephisto - another Ruby on Rails blog.

The reason? Typo seems to suck memory like a .. big sucky thing.

Posting a new comment would take the system-load on my VM up to 2, which is not acceptible. I'm prepared to suffer a little with my decision to never install, host, or admin a PHP-based application, but not that much.

Mephisto seems nice, although the importing of old posts was a little fraught with peril. Thankfully the system, when used with Mongrel and an Apache proxy seems fast, stable and not too memory intensive.

The only thing that didn't happen properly was the closing of comments on all the older entries. Comments on new entries appeared to be correct in the sense that they should be automatically disabled after 7 days.

Here's how I fixed that:

skx@skx:~$ script/console production

1
2
3

Article.find(:all).each do |a|
 a.update_attribute :comment_age, -1
end

Tags: comments, mephisto, rails, typo | No comments

So I run a blog. You might have read bits of it in passing, probably more due to syndication than actual desire.

Initially I started off using Wordpress, but that was later purged once I bit the bullet and decided I'd rather be blogless than install PHP upon any server I cared about.

To replace my blog I looked for different solutions and eventually decided to try something built upon Ruby (on Rails). That lead to me trying Typo. After a little bit of pain I decided this wasn't a great solution.

So in the hunt for something new I moved to Mephisto, but over the past few months I've noticed that my virtual machine has been running low on memory - and the culprit has always been the Mongrel isntance which was running the blog.

So once more into the breach.

This time I had a new plan. I'd actually use a piece of blog software which I wrote for a couple more sites, a static system which outputs RSS & HTML files - with no dynamic-fu at all. That system is the chronicle blog compiler.

In performing the migration I accidentally flooded a couple of Planet-Planet installations. It took me a moment to work out why, and that was because my RSS feeds didn't include valid "pubDate" files for the entries..

So now I've made a new release of chronicle which supports valid RSS feeds, as tested against the feed validator and all is well. Well almost.

Users no longer have access to post comments, and whilst I've successfully migrated 700+ entries through to four different blogging engines I've managed to lost most (all) comments along the way at different points in time which is a real shame.

In the future I'll setup a simple CGI system to write comments to text files, and then allow them to rsync'd and merged into the entries. I just don't have the concentration to manage that right now.

In the meantime hello to Planet Sysadmin - never heard of you before, but thanks for carrying my feed. I'm suprised I qualify, but I guess at the very least I'm spreading interesting lyrics...

(Remind me to post the mod_rewrite rules I'm using now; I've kept all links at the same location through successive blog migrations which means I have numerous mod_rewrite rules which are probably obsolete, but I just don't want to touch them because cool URIs don't change....)

Tags: chronicle, mephisto, wordpress | No comments