Why are you using such an insecure and old browser? Please be aware that this site will not display properly in Internet Explorer 6. You can either upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or use a proper browser such as Safari, Firefox or Opera.

Recently on Twitter

New site design and blogging engine

Posted by Jonathan Conway on 2008-08-08  Comments

After a failed attempt to move away from Mephisto to MT earlier this year I was determined to find a blogging engine that I could easily adapt to my evil and wicked ways. I’d looked at a few ‘toy’ blogging engines written in Ruby, I’d even looked at some PHP based blogging apps but I’m a busy busy busy man. I don’t have time to swim through a mess of PHP (Wordpress) or write yet another blogging engine.

What I needed was something that gave me enough to build upon and yet was easily configurable… Hopefully through Ruby as that’s what I use for my day job. A while ago I’d stumbled across Feather. At first I wasn’t impressed, but recently I’d seen more and more Ruby based blogs convert from Typo/Mephisto to Feather. This peeked my interest enough to give it a try and here’s a few of the things I found:

i) Built on Merb (bonus for me as 70% of what I do these days utilizes Merb).

ii) Flexible plugin architecture based upon Merb slices. I groked this a lot faster than Mephisto plugins which had more of a learning curve.

iii) A whole plethora of plugins such as Mephisto importing, theming, Twitter and more.iv) Ability to have my url structure impersonate that of my old Mephisto blog. No more mod_rewrite hackery to make sure there aren’t any dead links.

Now onto the bad news. As Feather is a new project there are a few ‘rough’ edges. In order to get this blog up I did have to roll my sleeves up but with the code in GitHub it didn’t take me long to get my new blog up and running. I do miss the sweet admin from Mephisto but it’s only a matter of time before Feather too has this functionality.

For those of you interested in the technical details; this blog is running on a modified version of Feather, Merb 0.9.4(edge), Datamapper 0.9.4(edge), Apache 2.2 and Phusion Passenger with a Rack Up file found on Merbivore.

The theme was designed by me and is called Tweetish. I know for a fact this theme doesn’t work under IE 6 and I have neither the time or interest in supporting such an old and insecure browser. So for the best experience use Safari, Firefox or even Internet Explorer 7. The themes been enhanced with some pseudo CSS3 magic which you won’t see in IE 7.

Oh and the last thing. After much deliberation I’ve dumped the old comments for now and the whole blog is using Disqus. Let me know what you think, now time for me to get some sleep.