So I've finally finished moving my blogging from WordPress, powered by PHP, to SimpleLog, which is powered by Ruby on Rails. Did it for a couple of reasons:
This definitely wasn't enjoyable, though. A 2-3 hour process from download to restyling to server setup to publishing turned into a 2-3 night affair. I was kind of assaulted on all sides... issues with installing my Rails stack on Slicehost, issues with SimpleLog's code, etc. Turns out a lot of the troubles stemmed from a borked deprec recipe, but things should be all sorted now and we should be good to go.
That's a good thing, since I've been wanting to type a few things up lately. We'll get to all of that soon enough. :)
Nice Zach! :D I also run my blog on simplelog, I love it, feels really lightweight. I also love how the admin is minimalistic and really smart looking.
I agree- I'm liking it thus far.
How do you have comments set up? Mine's on the approval basis, so I need to go in and approve them manually for the moment. I do miss the built-in Akismet integration on WordPress- I've been thinking about writing a plugin for SimpleLog that'll let me do that. Or trying out a few clever comment form tweaks that help out in fighting comment spam. Oi, do I hate comment spam.
Well currently, I'm not getting much spam so I leave it as automatically posted to the page, but as a overview I have the comments rss feed in Newsfire in case some jackass posts anything bad. I think the blacklist has been good thus far.
New layout looks good! Its nice and fast! you should set up a redirect on zacholman.com/blog would be my only suggestion!
Yeah, I'll be spending the next week or so cleaning up stuff like that... not quite a fun job to do redirects and cleaning up formatting of old posts all at once. I think I'm just going to drop images from all of my previous (and future) posts... it's a bit more work for, well, just a picture. I'll just say an extra thousand words the next time I think about putting in a picture. :)
Interesting I'd never heard of Simplelog, our developer will love it, he's a nut for rails.
We actually run Wordpress off Slicehost, though i suppose its about how you want to set it up.
Anyhow, nice blog :-) I always thought good-tutorials was a lot better made than its competitors, interesting to see the person behind it!
Thanks for the kind words, Collis. :)
Simplelog is nice because after looking at the other Rails options (like Mephisto), it just seems simpler. I suppose it's not a big deal if you have multiple bloggers pushing out plenty of posts a day and you need some heavy-duty software to support everything, but for just a solo developer blogging every few days, it's just the no-frills code I need (so far, at least!)
I'm digging the new look and feel. Nice job.
You cannot imagine how crazy this very same process is to me right now. I've been trying to install Simplelog on Dreamhost. I've already followed the steps, checked through forums but nothing.
I'm seriously willing to pay for someone to install this for me. I really enjoy the simplicity of it but I'm not really well verse with Ruby, which has contributed to my failure of having it installed. Can you assist in any way please?
Just checking out to make sure comments are running a-okay and such.
The design of the blog was something I tossed together on top of the basic SimpleLog template, mostly because I just wanted to get on and get going with the blog (this was naturally before all of my issues with install). I'll try giving it a refresh a few weeks or months down the line regardless. :)