In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.

I went so far as to install Typo on a Linux machine on my home network, and I definitely liked what I saw. In many ways, I was puzzled why so many people had left Typo for Mephisto. I had heard a lot of talk about Mephisto’s supposedly cleaner and simpler admin interface, but I found myself preferring the power and features available with Typo. In my estimation, Typo’s admin interface seems quite adequate in the simplicity department, too. The only other complaint that I had heard about Typo was that it was flaky and slow. I never did enough experimentation to determine whether I would experience these problems with Typo, so I have nothing to say about Typo’s stability. However, the possibility having been raised did give me pause about moving to Typo.

Still, I suspect I may have moved to Typo if it hadn’t been for my new Rails job combined with one other significant detail.

My blog runs on a Slicehost account that I share with my friend Josh. He runs WordPress and some other PHP based sites. He has grown to share my distaste for PHP and was interested in the possibility of running a Rails application for one of his projects. When we started looking into this idea, we noticed for the first time how much of a memory hog a Rails application is. As discussed in this blog post, Rails doesn’t “scale down”. It’s great for large web applications, but it doesn’t work so nicely for small web sites. Sure, it can provide the backbone for a small website, but the cost in memory footprint just isn’t worth it when you can develop the same kinds of small web sites in PHP and not run out of resources so rapidly.

There was one final issue that weighed in on my blogging software setup. I had chosen to run my Mephisto based blog on top of a PostgreSQL database because it is my database preference. However, Josh’s web applications were all base upon MySQL databases and so it seemed wasteful of our limited Slice resources to be running two different database servers.

All these factors came together in my decision to migrate my blog from Mephisto with PostgreSQL to WordPress with MySQL.

The move has been very smooth, and in all honesty, I’m loving the excellent features that WordPress brings to the table out of the box. It truly is the gold standard of blog software even if it is apparently written in crufty PHP.

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own.

Everytime I looked, I could never really justify the cost for my own modest needs, i.e. this blog. But then, I started getting back in touch with a local anarchist group whose website had become stagnant. They were hoping to some new things with it and I was planning on helping them out. When I saw the hosting plan that the group currently uses and considered the kind of site that the group really wanted and needed, I thought that a hosting upgrade for their site was definitely in order. While considering options for their site, I thought that perhaps if I had a Slicehost account then perhaps I could offer the group free hosting for their website.

Which set wheels turning in my head…

I knew that my friend Josh was running into difficulties with his family blog and his wife’s photography business site because his ISP had started blocking various ports. The same possibility loomed over my blog as it too resided on a home based server that was fully at the mercy of the Charter Cable powers that be.

So it occurred to me that Josh and I might together have enough needs to justify splitting the costs.

Fortunately, Josh agreed with my idea, and so we purchased ourselves a 256slice and have been quite happy with the results! So for the last two months, this blog has been happily running on our new Slice instead of a Virtual Ubuntu Feisty server running on top of my old Athlon 64 2800 Windows box.

This move actually fixed several problems for me. First, my Windows box has always been pretty flaky. I purchased it from a local shop that puts together systems, and it has exhibited all sorts of problems including the motherboard burning out two sticks of RAM and one catestrophic failure to boot that led to an OS corruption and a complete reinstall. It’s been fairly stable for awhile now, but it does have two persistant flukes: the front USB port appears to short circuit and cause a shutdown of the machine if used and whenever the house experiences a short power flicker, the computer shut offs and requires me to unplug and replug it in before the power button will successfully boot the machine again. Thanks to this last issue, I would more often than I like find my blog down during the day and not be able to fix the problem until I returned home.

Another problem was that the DynamicDNS service that had mapped theweatherses.org to my home network did not offer the free email forwarding that my domain registar had offered when we were using its DNS servers. As a result, the email aliases that my wife had set up suddenly stopped working when I began to point our domain to our home machines. I had gotten around this problem by running my own mail server, but then one day my ISP decided to start blocking port 25.

Now with the Slicehost, I no longer need to pay for the DynamicDNS service that mapped my domain to a server. Instead, I have returned to my registar’s DNS servers and the email aliases have become functional once more. Problem solved!

The only lingering issue was connecting to my home network via a static domain now that theweatherses.org no longer pointed home, but fortunately, I could now simply make use of a free DynamicDNS service to map to a less spiffy domain that is just as useful for the simple purpose of providing a static means of connecting to my home network.

So far the Slicehost has been a wonderful experience! It’s nice to have a spot on the Internet with which one can pretty much do anything.

So far this blog hasn’t seen too much activity and hasn’t even touched anything remotely related to politics or religion. For the most part, that’s because I have been completely swamped at work and just haven’t had the time for anything that wasn’t related to getting the project at work off the ground and running. Thankfully, we have a delivery coming up on Monday, and there is an ever so slight drop in pressure as we ship a release.

So this weekend has been the first time in weeks that I have had the leisure to really examine my blog again and think about its look. After playing around a bit, I found some inspiration in the wee hours of the morning and managed to update the look of the blog once more. I’m not certain whether this is the final product, but it definitely represents a first step towards defining my own look for this site. Thanks go out to Malin for some useful pointers about colors and contrast!

So, what do you think?

Well, I could only stand Mephisto’s default simpla theme for so long. Now while I fully intend to create my own look for this blog in short order, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to provide a quick face lift especially after I managed to find a large list of custom themes available for Mephisto. I decided that riddish would do very nicely. It has a clean presentation and I like the usage of red in the theme.

When writing these posts and even more so while playing with the templates that define the look and feel of Mephisto, I much missed the syntax highlighting and editing capabilities of my favorite text editor vim. I did some digging around and found that with the installation of a suitable Firefox extension, I was able to have Firefox pop up vim to let me edit the contents of most text areas in the browser. Pretty convenient!

At some point in August last year, I found myself bitten by the blogging bug. However, being the somewhat neurotic perfectionist that I am, it has taken this long to finally get to writing a first post, and I still don’t have things the way that I like.

Despite the fact that there are a plethora of sites online that offer blogging services for anyone itching to publish their thoughts to the world, I decided that seeing as I run my own Gentoo Linux server at home, I would go through the trouble of setting up my own installation of a blogging tool. I figured that it would be a fun learning experience and that I would also enjoy the advantages of a fully customizable blog with no worries about having to rely on some corporate server to safeguard the stuff that I write. Call me silly, but I like having full control over my own data – especially if its going to be a journal like this one.

(Of course, the more thoughtful reader will surely posit the excellent question of why I use Gmail for my personal email, if I’m so finicky about my personal data. Oh well. You got me there! Let’s just say I really like Gmail’s interface features and convenience and that I have never had a lick of success with setting up a fully functional mail server at home. So there.)

After sitting on any urges to blog about something for a few months, I finally got around to doing something constructive about it in late October when I began researching blogging software. After a lot of reading, I finally settled upon WordPress as it seemed to be the closest thing to a favored tool out there. It certainly looked sexy enough and easy to use. One thing that bugged me about WordPress though was that I had been really holding out for a blogger with a PostgreSQL backend. Now I know that some WordPress savvy folks might be saying to themselves that there is a modified version out there that uses PostgreSQL, but I got the impression that it might be flaky and that it is hasn’t been actively developed of late. I decided that if I was going to use WordPress, I wanted to use the latest and greatest version.

So after failing to find anything to meet my PostgreSQL desires, I took the plunge and installed WordPress on my Linux box around All Hallow’s Eve. With just a few quick emerge calls at the command prompt, I had that familiar and simple, yet elegant default WordPress demo layout staring back at me on my computer screen, and I felt a nice sense of accomplishment! I had even come up with what I thought was a nice name for the blog: eRant. The name fit nicely with the idea that I would use its space to occasionally rant about politics and religion and spare my poor wife the daily wonderful conversation starter: “Honey, you know what sucks?”.

Things were coming together nicely and I was on the brink of blogging bliss. Never one to accept a default configuration, I sought to spice things up a bit with a custom theme.

And of course, that’s when the procrastination started…

For some reason, I just really didn’t feel up to messing with the PHP templates and the CSS files necessary to create my ultimate personal blog. It sounded much, much more appealing to catch up on my fiction reading, do some video editing, or half a dozen other things.

And if my blog couldn’t look super spiffy, then I really had no use for posting to it.

So it just sat there waiting patiently. If my blog had had thumbs, it probably would have been twiddling them silently while contemplating the act of suicide out of sheer loneliness.

Months passed by silently. The Wheel of Time turned so to speak. And during the nice, relaxed and joyful days of Christmas vacation, my Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition arrived in the mail and at once I found myself happily reading away while building a Rails application along with the authors. I had been meaning to play with Rails for well over a year, and now through this well written book, I was finally getting to see how much fun developing a web application can be, and it only further intensified my love for that precious gem of language called Ruby.

Drunk with the heady euphoria of playing around with Ruby and Rails instead of doing battle with some awful mess of PHP code at work, I decided that if I was to run a blog at home, it should be a Rails app by golly because Rails is just plain cool. And that was that!

So I did some more digging around on the web as my idle PHP-based WordPress blog sat silently awaiting its fate in dread. I came back to the Radiant content management system that was used to create the nice and polished new Ruby website. The demo on the Radiant website showed that the software could be also used to create a blog. The wheels were starting to turn…

Perhaps now was the time when all good and brave Johns would seize the corundum encrusted gauntlet of destiny and redesign their personal webpages with the Rails powered Radiant and then integrate them with shiny new blogs for a better day!

Yeah.

But while reading the blog of the John Long the author of Radiant, I came across an article that indicated that John was now using Mephisto for his blog. He mentioned that while Radiant was more focused on CMS, Mephisto was probably more optimized for blogging.

Intrigued, I sped over to the Mephisto site and downloaded it for a try.

To be honest, I didn’t really care for its default theme as compared with the one that WordPress sports fresh from an installation. But I had wanted to design my own theme, and at least, this way I would be running a Rails-based blog and get the pleasure of working with Ruby instead of PHP when it came time to tweak things under the hood.

With my decision made, it was only a matter of getting the bloody thing to play nice with my Apache installation. Sure I could easily get the blog up and running on Port 3000 in my private home network, but thanks to Charter’s wonderful paternal port blocking, I couldn’t access the thing remotely and that means neither could any friends, family, or the morbidly curious.

I have to hand it to WordPress in that at least it was pretty much ready to go after installation. With Mephisto, I had to figure out how to get a Rails application running with Apache, and my sobering initial attempts at investigation left me disappointed and seeking better ways to enjoy my vacation.

So alas the dream of a blog was shelved again until the new year…

On one lonely night in the middle of a coding spree for work, I decided to take a break and play with the dark magic that is Apache’s configuration files. My first attempt was a near success. I decided that I would try running Mephisto through Apache’s FastCGI module as an aliased directory external to the document root of my web server. At first things seemed good. When I pointed my browser at the http://theweatherses.org/mephisto, I was greeted with the familiar default Mephisto front page.

There was great joy.

But when I tried logging onto the Administration site, I found a lifeless and CSSless page that redefined the word bland. It seemed that I had encountered a problem involving Rails apps in subdirectories of the http server’s document root. Despite my various attempts at directing things to the right locations via Aliases and Rewrites, I could never resuscitate my poor Mephisto admin site’s color and vigor.

After a suitable period of remorse and frustration and with the sun of a new day shining brightly through a corporate window, I discussed my struggles with my good friend and sometimes idea bouncing-board Josh. We talked about how he had recently installed WordPress at home for his family, and he mentioned how he had setup different virtual domains. It became apparent that I could easily add a virtual domain of say erant.theweatherses.org to my current site theweatherses.org via my Domain Name Registration company.

Armed with this new knowledge, I wasted little time setting up a new virtual domain for my server. Then, I proceeded to happily configure Apache to redirect incoming traffic for this virtual host to a proxy server in the form of the ever reliable Mongrel HTTP Ruby server. With the last click of a the key in my editor saving the changes to my configuration file, I hastened to start Mongrel and restart Apache.

A satisfied smile spread across my face when I saw Mephisto running my new eRant blog in all its Simpla glory. The smile spilled over into true joy when I moved on to the Administration login screen and found that indeed all the CSS and Javascript files were now being properly found there as well!

My blog had been reborn in Ruby and now I simply needed to design a super spiffy theme for it…

Ahem. Or maybe just write my first blog entry and worry about the look and feel another time.