tags: mephisto
2007
July
- 2007 Jul 31
- ch… ch… changes
Just a quick status report: I’ve been struggling mightily with Ruby on Rails, the web application framework du jour, and I finally managed to get a working copy of Mephisto, yet another blog engine. While Typo was OK, I unfortunately discovered that AJAXy-goodness wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be when I couldn’t easily customize my blog. While the idea of drag-and-drop widgets is cool, it’s also slow as hell, and I just didn’t have the patience to wait for the refreshes, particularly when in some cases, I could just write the requisite HTML in the same time.
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August
- 2007 Aug 2
- getting mephisto (trunk) to work on dreamhost
I found all of this rather confusing, since I’m pretty sure I downloaded the same version of Mephisto to my local machine as well as to my Dreamhost account. But I got things running on my local machine with no problem, but had to struggle for a couple of days to get it to work on Dreamhost (with Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails 1.2.3 as of this writing.)
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 2
- wordpress → typo → mephisto
Now, bear in mind, there are decent scripts lurking in
· Read more…vendor/plugins/mephisto_convertersthat will do a reasonable conversion from either Wordpress→Mephisto or Typo→Mephisto. The problem that comes up, however, is the dichotomy between categories and tags. While I was still using Wordpress (which only offers categories and does not offer tags), I was basically using categories as tags. I never really did get into the whole semantic partitioning between categories vs. tags and find that tags alone satisfy my organizational mindset (meaning, complete chaos, but I digress. - 2007 Aug 9
- blogging clients (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
So far, I’ve tried three desktop blogging clients for Mac OS X: Journler, MarsEdit, and Ecto.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 14
- back to the beginning
Mephisto broke for some reason. It may have been the plugin that I was experimenting with. But even when I took it out again, it stayed broken. I kept getting the dreaded 500 error. So I did a clean re-install. The blog itself is now still accessible (although I moved it to chaosanddisorder.net.) But I can’t get into the admin page.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 15
- fubar. snafu.
So apparently it was all Dreamhost’s fault. Both Mephisto and Movable Type are working at reasonable speeds. I still stand by the notion that Dreamhost really can’t handle Ruby on Rails very well. I’m looking into switching to (or at least adding on) a different shared host. Site5 looks promising.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 15
- more fubar
D’oh! Another thing I realized is that I just nuked my Mephisto database. The only thing still sitting on the server are some random archives and the index, and luckily, the Atom feed. I have my Wordpress install backed up, and my database for Typo is still around, so the only thing I’m probably missing are a few posts between the last time I used Typo and the oldest entry I posted from Mephisto that is still in the Atom file. Hopefully I can import all this stuff without too much headache.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 20
- indecision
The problem I’m having with Movable Type is I don’t like how the permalinks work. Since using Blosxom, I’ve grown accustomed to permalinks of the type such as
· Read more…http://domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug, which happens to be the default format of Wordpress and Mephisto. (This was actually one of the reasons I wasn’t fond of Typo, because of the it inserts the wordarticlebetween the domain name and the year. I found this unnecessarily crufty.) - 2007 Aug 21
- mephisto on Mac OS X
Currently, I am actually running a copy of Mephisto on my sister’s MacBook. Navigating the interface seems marginally faster than interacting with a remote copy on Dreamhost, but that could all be placebo effect. The main reason I wanted to do this is because I didn’t want to have to SSH into my shell account on Dreamhost for troubleshooting purposes. To be fair, it seems like they’ve taken care of their networking issues and the massive amounts of latency is now gone, but still.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 22
- there and back again
So after much toil and trouble, I managed to migrate back from MT4 to Mephisto. I really wasn’t into the way MT4 handles archives. Of the blog engines I’ve tried so far, there are only really three that allow me to have permalinks the way I like them (
· Read more…domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug). These are (1) Blosxom, (2) Wordpress, and (3) Mephisto. Granted, Blosxom doesn’t do this out of the box. (Actually, Blosxom doesn’t do much of anything at all out of the box) I probably would’ve stuck to Typo if I could’ve figured out how to get rid ofarticlesfrom the permalink. Oh well. - 2007 Aug 25
- rails grief/bot hammering
Not sure this made any difference, but I reverted down to r7357 for Edge Rails because r7358 kept running into MySQL out of memory errors.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 25
- never what you expect
So, yes, now it's Simplelog, yet another blog engine running on Ruby on Rails. I guess I'll be sticking to the stable distribution right now, although it doesn't look like the codebase has really been touched in the past 6 months.
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 28
- it's never enough (successfully migrating from mephisto to simplelog)
When you get down to it, Mephisto has all the things I want in a blog engine. Non-crufty permalinks. (Only Wordpress formats its permalinks similarly, although you can easily get this from Blosxom.) A clean interface (Simplelog is probably the only one that is as clean.) A templating system that doesn't utilize nested angle-brackets (something that every single templating system out there has a problem with, except for Liquid, XSLT, and Erubis.) A templating system that strives to separate business logic from presentation (this is something I hate about PHP, and it's the thing that drove me away from Wordpress and which keeps me away, despite the fact that it has been the easiest blog engine to deal with so far. This is the thing that I love about XSLT despite its obtuse, arcane syntax. This is what I fear about Erb, because it makes it so easy to insert Ruby into your templates, leading to the potential of a PHP-like mess. Granted, Ruby is a much cleaner language than PHP, but still.)
· Read more… - 2007 Aug 28
- migrating from mephisto to simplelog
So I managed to teach myself how to use Rails a little, mainly, how to utilize the magic that is ActiveRecord (which unfortunately probably took me at least 48 hours of sustained effort spread out over the last six days.) ActiveRecord makes me almost forget that I'm dealing with a SQL database. I don't have know any arcane syntax. I just have to know Ruby, which is an extremely Zen-like thing to know. (I know it's a stereotype, but, damn, you've got to hand it to the Japanese.) OK, I'm oversimplifying. I haven't really gotten the hang of join tables, but its nothing that convoluted kludgery can't get around.
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December
- 2007 Dec 22
- switching back from simplelog to mephisto
In case you didn't notice, I also switched my blog engine again. Now that Rails 2.0 is out, I thought I'd give Mephisto (from
· Read more…svn) another spin, and it seems to be working relatively well, much better than when I last tried it, although I still get the occasional 500 error. - 2007 Dec 27
- Dreamhost, htaccess, and routes.rb
I have never been able to get my
· Read more….htaccessfile to properly redirect requests from different blog engines. For example, Simplelog tacks on either/archives/or/past/to its URLs, and Typo tacks on/articles/to its posts. That's one of the things I like about Mephisto: it doesn't add what I feel are superfluous tokens to the URLs. (Although I am still trying to figure out how to get rid of/archives/from the monthly posts.) - 2007 Dec 28
- simplelog to mephisto
migrating from Simplelog to Mephisto
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2008
January
- 2008 Jan 21
- technical difficulties (mephisto failed to start properly)
So I can't seem to log-in to my blog currently. What I ended up doing was trying something that may have untoward side-effects. (Which reminds me, I should probably backup my database.)
· Read more… - 2008 Jan 21
- giving up on rails on dreamhost
Since I'm only averaging about 500 hits per day, shared hosting should theoretically be sufficient for my purposes. Alas, Mephisto continually dies on Dreamhost, and since I couldn't get my kludgery to work (mostly because I can't seem to install the
· Read more…mysqlgem on my local setup), I gave up completely and found a host that actually supports Rails. - 2008 Jan 23
- mephisto, rmagick, and hostingrails
Got bit in the ass with this bug when I migrated Mephisto to another host. Looks like you have to explicitly define what imaging package you have in
· Read more…config/initializers/custom.rb.:nonewill definitely work, but so far:rmagickhasn't caused Mephisto to crap out either, although I have yet to upload an image. I don't really have any experience with:imagescience.
April
- 2008 Apr 25
- fixed
While I had stay at work all night until the morning, I really didn't do much besides get Mephisto up and running again. This all started because I got sick of the Scribbish theme (which is, nonetheless, a great theme—I dig the hAtom support). I tried to install the Clarity-Orange theme but because Safari irritatingly always decompresses files, I ended up with a folder instead of zip file.
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2015
August
- 2015 Aug 4
- Long Term Project
It's been five months give or take since I decided to move my blog to a new domain and to migrate all my entries to Jekyll.
· Read more… - 2015 Aug 31
- Migrations
So I've been slowly going through all my blog posts lately, converting them to YAML+Markdown to use with Jekyll
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November
- 2015 Nov 11
- full circle
Still amused by how I've gone full circle from Blosxom to Jekyll
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