Reborn!

It took me a while to do, but I’ve finally made good on my threat and switched from Typo to Mephisto. It wasn’t as easy as advertised, but I got there in the end (I’ll follow up on this at a later date – promise).

Breaking up is hard to do

This is the bit where I should point out all the good things about my blog engine of choice – Typo – before explaining to it that it’s not Typo’s fault, things just aren’t working out.

Stuff that.

Typo is good, but it is bloated and keeps dying on my server for no reason and I’ve had enough. Other RoR apps are ticking over quite nicely on this box, so why does Typo have an issue?

Sorry Typo, it’s not me – it’s you. Pack your bags and sling your hook.

Now to start trawling the classifieds to find a new blog engine before I succumb to temptation and write my own.

(This is a roundabout way of say that this site has been ** recently and I’m finally going to do something about it.)

…and another one

Looks like the previous update isn’t as watertight as we’d like. Until 1.1.6 is out the door, here’s a workaround.

If you’re running Typo from svn, update to the head revision to get this fix.

Mandatory Upgrade

"They might want to replace that one" by Unhindered by Talent

Following the advice of the Rails core team, I have upgraded my server to run Ruby on Rails 1.1.5:

Seeing as I’m currently only hosting two rails applications – this blog and Flickrlilli (which was used to source the above image) – I deemed it a fairly safe thing to do. I also took the opportunity to update this blog to Typo edge (revision 1208 to be precise).

Both upgrades were completely painless and had the minimum of downtime which is always a nice thing.

Still Weird

Looks like I was wrong the other day – it wasn’t stray markup that was causing problems. There seems to be something fundamentally broken with my Typo installation.

Everytime I make a post I get the [FATAL] failed to allocate memory error. Sometimes if I repeatedly retry (with re-starting the application inbetween) it lets a post through, but it is starting to get very frustrating.

Right now I’m torn between trying to determine and (hopefully) fix the problem – although I’m hitting a brick wall with that right now – or switching to something else.

After spending some time in #typo and getting nowhere fast, I decided to try a fresh checkout from the trunk which would appear to have fixed the problem. No idea why, but I’m not complaining!

Now that was weird

My previous post was delayed by 48 hours due to a very weird problem in Typo that needs further investigation.

Whenever I tried to publish the post, the mongrel instance for this application would disappear in a puff of smoke leaving only the following message:

That’s it. Nothing else.

By process of elimination, I figured out that it may be some stray markup in the post I was writing – I was quoting an email – but in the end all I removed was a fairly innocuous URL that wasn’t even embedded in a link.

One day I’ll sit down and figure it out, but until then normal service is resumed.

Comments disabled

Ah the joys of running bleeding edge software. It would appear that comments are broken in Typo svn at the moment. I tried a couple of the patches without success so instead I’ve disabled comments until it’s a) fixed or b) I fix it.

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