this blog is girtby.net

Settling In

If you’re reading this in a feed aggregator, click on through to enjoy the beautiful new theme that I have spent hours slaving over.

OK it’s the same as the old theme, but don’t let that stop you from having a look. The new theme means that I am finally settling into my new digs, namely the Mephisto blogging engine.

As regular readers will know, late last year I needed to migrate away from Typo, and Mephisto seemed to require the least effort. The migration was (relatively) seamless, and the new platform is a pleasant surprise. It’s better than Typo in many ways, having:

• a powerful model of page and article structure that resembles a lightweight CMS;
• themes based on the liquid template engine and are easy to install and manage;
• AJAXy comment moderation;
• much more active development (and one of the main developers is also a rails committer);
• much less resource usage (with a thumbs-up from my hosting provider); and
• plugins (not as easy to use as wordpress, but plugins nonetheless).

Notwithstanding this there are still some niggling problems, the most visible of which is an intermittent fault which causes a generic Mephisto error “Status: 500 Internal Server Error”. If you see this, please be aware that I know about it and am monitoring it. If you get it while trying to post a comment (sigh), just email me.

In slightly tangential news, I’m exploring the use of SVK to manage the Mephisto codebase and my changes. So far it looks pretty powerful, and I will report back after further investigation.

One more thing: I’m at linux.conf.au this week. If you are too, let’s meet.

FYI, the comments feed is still a little borked: links to comments take me to the articles proper, not the new comments themselves.

Be aware that svk and base svn clients don’t play nice. You have to switch all your systems over (tortoise, cmd line, subclipse, whatever emacs doohickey you’re using, etc. plus the server), especially if you’re going to be making changes with all the clients you use… Otherwise, corruption of merge state is the likely outcome.

links to comments take me to the articles proper, not the new comments themselves

Ok that should be fixed. I say shoud because it is fixed on my local Mephisto install, and the fix has been uploaded to the production server, and the server has been restarted. So like I say it should be fixed.

Probably some weird Rails production-only caching magic at work. With luck it will fix itself with this comment.