if you are reading this, typo is dead.

Posted by Dick on December 11, 2007

I’m happy. It feels a lot lot faster, both rendering and in the admin screens.

Quick summary :

  • articles and comments  came over ok (articles via the RSS importer, comments by hand)
  •  the theme existed for both typo and wordpress
  • google analytics needed pasting into your <head>
  • have told wordpress to use the same permalink format as typo did
  • set up some 301s for the old typo RSS and atom feeds

Let me know if anything seems wrong. I’ve been tailing access logs and amazingly I do have some readers (!), so don’t be shy.

 Things I know are broken but probably won’t fix:

  • old Typo URLs for per-article RSS ( I couldn’t see why anyone would want that)
  • tags (the RSS importer set them up as categories instead, which I’m fine with)

I’m not delighted about having to run on MySQL (I‘ll be mysqldumping twice a day),but the schema is much saner than typos had become by 4.x. I’ve already fixed up somethings on the mysql command line faster than I could have found them in the web frontend.

ok kids, get in the car

Posted by Dick on December 06, 2007

I’ve now officially taken all the shit I’m going to from Typo.

  • a seemingly dead codebase
  • rubbish antispam
  • takes an age to post comments
  • takes even longer to delete spam comments (see above points)
  • have a cronjob to restart it 4 times a day

(The last point seems to be standard practice for plenty of commercial software I’ve babysat over the years, but I’m not having it here).
To be fair, a lot of the issues are down to running this on a $12/month hosting account – I’ve had to turn off a lot of features to save memory.

I’m in the middle of migrating from Textdrive → Joyent anyway and I refuse to replicate this shambles on the new box.

The plan is to switch over to Wordpress (yes, it’s PHP, but I don’t intend to hack the code at all).

I’m going to pull all the articles over by abusing the RSS feed, so anyone on a reader might see a few (hundred) duplicate posts in the next day or two. Will do my best to preserve permalinks and comments, although tags might go south for a bit.

typo 2.6.0 -&gt; 4.0.3

Posted by Dick on August 11, 2006

Now that the dust has settled a little , I thought it was time to upgrade the blog to 4.0.x.

I was running typo 2.6.0 with rails frozen at 1.0.0 , so to be honest I was expecting trouble. WEBrick ran so fast on my dummy run I thought it was worth the risk.

If you’re thinking of trying it yourself:

CYA

  • backup everything, including the database
  • switch your typo theme back to ‘azure’

The last one saves you a lot of hassle if you’re using a ‘tweaked’ theme – if typo can’t find default.rhtml, it won’t run (it’s not as easy to switch themes from the console as it used to be, as the Settings model has been replaced).

fitter, happier

  • download and extract the typo tarball (gems on textdrive are a pain in the arse.) – this includes rails 1.1.6 in vendor1/.
  • copy over your existing config/database.yml
  • migrate the database
 rasputnik typo-4.0.2 $ RAILS_ENV=production rake migrate

Watch it Just Work (it does on postgresql, anyway),
start it up and have a poke around.

start chopping

On Textdrive, they recently enforced resource limits. After a minute or two I started getting 500 errors as the fcgi backends bloated up and were killed off.
Luckily I’d been warned about this.

 rasputnik typo/ $ cd components/plugins/sidebars
 rasputnik sidebars $ ls
 aimpresence               delicious_controller.rb    tada
 aimpresence_controller.rb flickr                      tada_controller.rb
 amazon                    flickr_controller.rb        tag
 amazon_controller.rb      fortythree                 tag_controller.rb
 ...
 ...
 ...
 rasputnik sidebars $ rm -r forty* backpack* amazon* upcoming*
 rasputnik sidebars $ # restart typo
 rasputnik sidebars $ killall -9 ruby && ~/bin/spawn-typo.sh

That should save you a few Mb. I’ve still had the preview pane crash once while I was writing this, but otherwise it seems a lot happier.

UPDATE – crash bang wallop

Well it’s been a month, and it’s finally stablized. Make sure to do the extra steps here (mainly removing Sparklines) if you’re resource restricted.

1 actually, it doesn’t. Looks like someone dropped a bollock (run ‘rake rails:freeze:gems’ if you want to lock it down).

unfortunate sequence of events

Posted by Dick on January 17, 2006

Apologies if anyone’s had trouble with the blog in the last few days.

I recently escaped Stalag MySQL and the postgresql schema load zeroed the id field sequences , so comments (ok, spam) probably weren’t publishable.
Articles certainly weren’t.
I must’ve lucked out on my test post – id 1 must have been free, so the constraint didn’t grumble.

Other than that and a wierd timewarp thing I’m really glad I switched. I’ve always disliked mysql, but on TextDrive there are more good reasons to switch.

  1. you don’t need to supply a password to psql, so you can cron backups in without all the worries about password safety
  2. dedicated db boxes are on the cards. I want to be on the pgsql server with the 2 dozen other guys rather than the mysql server with a bazillion php users (no offence boys, just a load thing).

tinfoil hats don’t even work

Posted by Dick on November 18, 2005

Sticking religiously to my can’t someone else do it? philosophy, I switched on Google Analytics yesterday.

Setting up awstats on textdrive was non-trivial (largely due to webmin) , and I’m not that happy with it.
I suppose it’s for ‘trend based’ analysis ( and sites with more than 6 or 7 readers a day :) ) but it lacks basic features like a proper daily view, or telling you who clicked on what (or which IPs mod_security is catching).
The Hives offering is based on urchin5 and therefore very purdy indeed (telling SFA that Urchin wasn’t on textdrive anymore was like telling my daughter Santa had died).

Piece of piss to install on typo:

  1. signup (you probably need a gmail account. they are very good.)
  2. paste the 4 lines of javascript just before </head> in typo/themes/yourtheme/layouts/default.rhtml
  3. empty your page cache (so this gets into all your public pages)
  4. Put some kind of ’WE PROUDLY CONSPIRE WITH THE ILLUMINATI (and google) TO READ YOUR BRAINWAVES’ disclaimer in your sidebar (GA sends info to google, so this is required by the Ts & cs)

As always there are annoyances.

  • once you paste the js into your site, google will check you
    installed it ok, and say you didn’t. This is a lie (they’ll check after about 6 hours.)
  • when they’re happy, they say it will take 12 hours. This is a lie (they do it whenever they feel like, gosh)
  • it uses Flash to render the reports. My Flash (on Firefox on Etch) can’t handle exotic output like, oh, text. That’s a shame. (think it’s arial – installing msttcorefonts from multiverse on Breezy fixes it. Debian appears to be sulking)

But my god, the piecharts. Such piecharts…

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