Back up and running on Rails with Simplelog

I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).

They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.

Anyhow, along with the move I decided to also drop Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent piece of blogging software and I have to admit, I may be back there if blogging becomes a bigger dev chore than I want, but the fact is, one of the main reasons I keep these servers running is to keep my hands-on skills from getting too rusty and blunt and I simply wasn’t learning anything from having wordpress as the bog platform. And fact is, I’m really loving my re-discovered interest in programming and webdev while working with Rails, so I took a look at the options, and in the end it came down to the excellent mephisto or simplelog .

I chose simplelog because of its more compact feature set and the fact mephisto 0.8 has stripped out xml-rpc posting which is kinda key for me (I’m using the excellent MarsEdit to post this up now).

The theme is a bit barebones but as soon as I’ll get some time, I’ll change it to something I like. One of the nice things about the theming is that it’s straight up Rails, no templating or other stuff, so I can do something hopefully simple and elegant without getting myself into too much trouble.

A few little things need to be fixed up. Migrating from wordpress was a bit rough and I also wanted to clean up a whack of kruft that has accumulated over the years in the blog as wordpress changed the way it did things, so needed to actually write migration scripts to get things over and then also wanted to move all the photos I’ve posted statically over the years to flickr (which has now been done !).

Anyhow, welcome to the new blog. Hopefully, it’ll also give me a better excuse to not let it lie fallow as well.