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New Blog Engine and Feed Urls

March 9th, 2008 by masukomi

Death to slow apps!

I killed Mephisto. Screw Rails’s inability to perform on shared hosts, and screw using a system that no-one has updated in any real way in years.

I was going to go back to my homebrew system but rip out the bits that the spammers loved so well, then I said “screw it”. I have no interest in maintaining blog software. I’ve got too many projects on my plate as it is. WordPress is damn good, has lots of cool widgets, and Askimet does a great job of filtering out blog spam. The fact that Mephisto used WordPress’s Askimet was the one thing I really liked about it.

So, new feed urls all around:
RSS 2: http://weblog.masukomi.org/?feed=rss2
RSS .92: http://weblog.masukomi.org/?feed=rss
Atom: http://weblog.masukomi.org/?feed=atom

If anyone reading this is also thinking of abandoning Mephisto I’ve got a teeny little script that’ll generate a LiveJournal XML export file from Mephisto (was the easiest thing to do) which WordPress (and other apps too, I’m sure) will import.

9 Responses

Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
March 9th, 2008 at 9:21 pm

Heh, ”death to slow apps” in the same breath as “all hail Wordpress” is kinda funny, considering Wordpress’ notoriety for pigging with the database (tons of expensive queries that return huge resultsets for every page generated). Still, there’s no denying that Wordpress has a lot of mind share and is pretty much the default choice for people who don’t care to monkey with their weblog in order to have one.

(In case you care for an opinion: Textpattern and Drupal are both better choices in terms of PHP apps.)

Also, you set up neither rewrite rules for Wordpress nor redirects for the old links, though. :-( Now I need to update my del.icious bookmarks… Also, if you set up a permanent redirect for the feed, pretty much all feed readers will automate resubscribe themselves to the new address with no intervention by the user.

But anyway, don’t let my grumbling get to you. Hooray for new digs! Not caring about sysadmin monkey work and getting over Not Invented Here: both good things. Also the theme is pretty, and much more readable than the old one’s teeny-tooty-tiny font sizes. Nice.
Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
March 9th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

Hmm, the theme breaks down on the A rebuttal to “Use Mercurial You Git” post. Apparently it doesn’t work well if a post is too long.
masukomi writes:
March 10th, 2008 at 12:23 am

You know, small fonts bug me too but the old look never struck me as small.
As for the irony of “death to slow apps” being followed by a switch to WordPress, you’re right, but it’s all relative. Comparing a Rails app on a typical shared host (Dreamhost in this case) to WordPress is like comparing a moped to a typical sub-compact car. Sure the subcompact isn’t blazing compared to a Ferarri but compared to the moped….. ;)

Old Permalinks should now work.
Old feed url redirects to new url
Long posts are now readable again although it’s not perfect.

Thanks for the feedback Aristotle.
Charles Darke writes:
March 10th, 2008 at 5:27 am

Thanks for the feed update warning! :)
Charles Darke writes:
March 10th, 2008 at 5:29 am

Actually, please also let us know how it goes with Wordpress. I looked at it a while back but found it too slow for my liking (and there were quite a few exploits for it at the time).

But I understand what you mean by maintaining your own homebrew blog system.
Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
March 11th, 2008 at 1:51 am

Kate: thanks for the fixes – much appreciated. :-)

T’would be nice if you could also import the comments. Your posts that got on reddit et al in particular had relatively long and interesting comment threads. (I found your weblog due to your Perforce rant. It’s the VCS that was historically used for the development of Perl, and your post came up in one of the long “which VCS do we switch to” threads that were taking place on perl5-porters at that time.)
masukomi writes:
March 11th, 2008 at 11:42 am

I think the perforce rant was one of the few posts with an interesting / any comment thread. It’s generally quite rare that anyone leaves a comment on my blog. I’m not sure what would be involved with importing the comments now that the posts have been imported (wouldn’t have been too big a deal during the initial import I suspect) so I think I’m going to just skip doing that for now. ;)
Daniel Yokomizo writes:
March 13th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

FYI your old feed urls are still working, I’m now receiving your bits of wisdom in duplicate ;) Should I keep the new or the old ones?
masukomi writes:
March 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

The old one is just being redirected to the new one and will continue to do so. It’s your call which to kill but i’d recommend killing the old one because in 2 years when i find some other engine to switch to i’ll probably forget to redirect the url from what will be 2 engines ago. ;)