Dom on rails!

Today I did it, I switched to typo on rails !

Why did I do it?

1. Comment spam was really getting ugly…
2. As you know I think PHP sucks , but perl cgi with an abandoned version of movable type isn’t very cool either
3. typo is on rails and I really wanted to get onto the rails , not only for this blog but also for future web projects
4. Now I have full control. I read and understood all the typo source code, adapted it to my needs, and can do what I want with it.
5. I really want to see how well rails behaves.
6. Did I menation that typo has a live search and textile support? very nice.
7. I’m in the fortunate position to be a customer of .webflow – one of the first german ISPs that is on the rails

Why didn’t I move my old content?

I didn’t want to. It’s good where it is. RendezCon and Days Left are served there, my PHP sucks page has a really good google rank. :-) If I had wanted it, there is a nice script in existence, that transfers all the content from movable type into typo.

What did I change in typo?

As I got onto rails and typo a month ago, some things where missing that I liked.

• Good caching
  I really think blog software sucks if the articles and the main page aren’t static pages. Fortunately that was a very easy thing to do with rails. In the default state typo cached only the rss feeds. I also had to put the cookie reading code for the comments into javascript instead of the default rails code.

• Categories
  Very easy. Is in latest typo release.

• Ajax comments
  It’s also in the lastest release, but without preview. And I really like having a preview, especially with all those nice textile possibilities.

• del.icio.us support
  for some very strange reason, the XML parser does not respect the order of the del.icio.us RSS feed, so i had to sort the entries again. I sent my patch to “too-biased”, but sadly it’s still not in there . And yes, my del.icio.us links have the delicious comment as title, so you get them when you move your mouse over them.

• The Layout
  Of course. Should look like my good old scrap. Just a little different. :-)

• A quick hack for MarsEdit
  Sadly MarsEdit strips out whitespace on certain occasions, so I had to hack the XMLRPC code to escape the responses a little bit different. Hopefully Brent will fix this soon.

• Live Search
  My live search searches in the title too… typo doesn’t.

Why so much effort, you hardly posted in the last months…

I know. Much stress lately, and the ever growing comment spam invasion on every post didn’t help either. But now I’m back, I swear. :-)