June 13th, 2006

RailsConf, Railsday, Vacation, and Mephisto

16 comments on 817 words

Have you ever had a moment in your life where you realize: “Wow! I have so much going on.” The next 30 days for me are going to be packed with all types of fun stuff and I can’t wait to get started!

RailsDay 2006

Rails day 2006 is right around the corner (June 17th). Myself, Rick Olson, and Courtenay Gasking will be meeting up in Los Angeles for our 24 hour hackfest. It’s gonna be fun to finally meet Rick and Courtenay in person as we attempt to stake our claim in the RailsDay hall of fame.

RailsConf 2006

RailsConf is coming up on the 22nd of June in Chicago. I’m looking forward to meeting all the rock stars and caboo.se characters. What does one say to Martin Fowler when he’s standing in the same room as you?

Will there be any other 9Rulers attending RailsConf?

Vacation

After we leave Chicago, my wife and I will be heading to Toronto for 3 days, then on to Niagara for 3 more, and finally we’ll end up in Ottawa for about two weeks. I’ll be meeting up with the rest of the Jaded Pixel crew while in Ottawa. We’re going to be working one week and hopefully partying the other week. ;-)

Mephisto

This is unrelated to the other happenings above, but I wanted to comment on this due to the recent happenings. The Rails Weblog has just swapped their blogging engine from Typo to Mephisto. Of course they would give Rick all the credit wouldn’t they. ;-p

Mephisto is a new Rails based publishing system (yes, another one). We haven’t released an official version of it yet, but we hope to be doing that soon. At the moment I’m implementing a new interface for Mephisto and we have to work out file management as well before we do an official release. Here is a sneak peak at the new interface (pay no mind to the text):

Mephisto

Some of you may or may not know, but I had a hand in Typo as well. It’s actually how I met and started working with Tobias. So why are people swapping from Typo? I don’t mean to take anything away from the talented folks who are doing the upkeep on Typo, but to me, Typo has lost focus of it’s purpose. Typo’s purpose was to publish content, but it has quickly evolved into much more, the interface has suffered as a result of this. There is so much focus on the development that the usability has taken a big blow. I’m not sure if the Typo team has an active designer on staff, but I know that a sole designer simply can’t keep up with the pace of development. Or, at least, this was the case right before I stopped working on it. (Disclaimer: I haven’t checked out any of the recent version of Typo).

With Mephisto it’s primarily just me and Rick working on it, although we have received some great contributions from others. We both have very high standards and we want to see those high standards reflected in what we release to the public. Mephisto is still in it’s infancy, but keep your eyes pealed for more to come.

Discussion

  1. Robert Robert said on June 13th

    Damn, that doesn’t seem like a fair team for RailsDay. :-) Best of luck, not that you’ll need it.

  2. Kyle Heon Kyle Heon said on June 13th

    Probably a dumb question but how does one setup Mephisto? I pulled down the app from subversion but can’t figure out how to create the inital database. I’m guessing there is some rake command that will import db/schema.rb but I’m not having luck. I tried to run rake db_schema_import and that creates the schema_info table but nothing else. Trying rake migrate barks about the articles table not yet existing.

  3. Justin Palmer Justin Palmer said on June 13th

    Kyle: This is a little shaky right now. Hopefully we’ll have better way to do this in the future. You should be able to run rake db:bootstrap and it will create your tables and setup some initial data for you.

  4. Sebastian Gräßl Sebastian Gräßl said on June 13th

    Wow! Every Project you touch looks absolutly amazing!

  5. António António said on June 14th

    Regarding mephisto I’m able to put everithing up, except login… admin/test as username/passwd won ‘t work…

  6. Dan Webb Dan Webb said on June 14th

    I’ll be at RailsConf if your up for a few beers in the name of JavaScript. Drop me a mail if you are.

  7. Scott Boms Scott Boms said on June 14th

    I’ll be there as well. Looking forward to getting my feet a bit more wet with Rails and getting to say hello to people such as yourself.

  8. Justin Palmer Justin Palmer said on June 14th

    @Sebastian: Thanks for the kind words!

    @Dan: Mmm. Beer and Javascript sounds great. I’ll be in touch. :-)

    @Scott: Look forward to seeing you there. I’m a big fan of your site.

  9. rabble rabble said on June 14th

    Thanks! Typo went down the wrong path a while ago and we’ve been stuck with it. I look forward to mephisto.

  10. Kyle Heon Kyle Heon said on June 14th

    Justin: Thanks for the info. I tried rake db:bootstrap and get the following error:

    —initialize_schema_information() -> 0.2101s —columns(“schema_info”) -> 0.0060s rake aborted! Mysql::Error: #42S02Table ‘mephisto_development.attachments’ doesn’t exist: DELETE FROM attachments

    I also tried this on a fresh database just to be sure. Any thought?

  11. Kyle Heon Kyle Heon said on June 14th

    I just did an svn up and things look good now. Not sure what the issue was but at least I can check things out. Excited to see what it offers as I feel that Typo is a big heavy for my needs.

  12. Kyle Bradshaw Kyle Bradshaw said on June 14th

    Tried to attempt a rake db:bootstrap but it complained that I didn’t have RMagick, is this a pre-requisite?

  13. Frederic de Villamil Frederic de Villamil said on June 16th

    Hi, thank you for the good work on Mephisto, it looks great.

    With some doc, it should even be better

  14. Vitor M. Costa Vitor M. Costa said on June 27th

    Viva Mephisto!!! I love it :)

  15. erde erde said on July 20th

    Viva Mephisto!!! I love it :) <—Hehe, thats it! :)

  16. Aníbal Rojas Aníbal Rojas said on August 6th

    Off Topic: This is just a quick note to invite you to register at RubyCorner.com, a meeting place for people interested in the Ruby Programming Language or any of the related technologies.

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