September 25th, 2006

Up and Running On Mephisto

11 comments on 685 words

Regardless if your in the physical world or digital world, moving is a tiresome task. I’ve been working the past couple months to get this blog moved over to a new server and up and running on Mephisto. Well, I’m finally on the home stretch.

A new server

I’ve ran Encytemedia on a VPS from Servint since it’s inception. When I first got up and running on my ServInt VPS, Rails was still in it’s infancy and I had never managed a vanilla VPS (thats no Control Panel for the designer folk) before.

ServInt has been great, but the setup I was on was old, like we don’t do nano old. I assume I was one of the first to run Rails on a ServInt VPS, so I hacked things together the best way I knew how. Well, I’ve finally decided that I was ready to move on to greener pastures and go with a host who is specifically tailored for Rails apps. I’m really loving Rails Machine. Bradley and crew have created tools that make it extremely easy to get up and running. I’ve never had to touch a single config file on the server, no mucking around with Apache, FastCGI, mongrel, etc. Everything just works, and thats the way I like it.

Mephisto, the new standard in blogging

I’ve migrated the blog from Typo to Mephisto. Me and Rick have worked extra hard on Mephisto. I never really liked the myriad of blogging and CMS applications available, all of the ones I tried had an interface only a developer could love.

I never really liked the myriad of blogging and CMS applications available, all of the ones I tried had an interface only a developer could love.

Building Mephisto has been a great experience. Considering we were the target market, we knew exactly what we wanted and had the skills to do it. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you really should give it an honest spin.

A new design

As you can see, Encytemedia is sporting a new design. I kind of rushed this one, but it will work for now. If it’s beauty you want to see, go here. I’m still implementing some things and fixing some bugs, so if your using something other than IE and spot a bug, please let me know.

The road ahead

Remember that rambling about moving in the physical space? Well, I’ll be doing that come the first of October. My wife and I are moving up to a new deluxe two bedroom apartment (high life!), and I’ll finally get an office of sorts so I can quit working from my bedroom. I get a balcony to boot, to bad it’s turning off cold now.

Finally, Thanks to everyone who continues to read my ramblings and and extra special thanks to those who take the time to comment, even if it is to correct me or contradict what I say. Look forward to more goodness in the future.

Update: Lesson: Never go to sleep after changing pretty much everything. I had a little hiccup which caused the site to be down for the past few hours, but hopefully everything should be good now.

Discussion

  1. Andre Medeiros Andre Medeiros said on September 25th

    The new design looks great!

    Good work!

  2. Nate K Nate K said on September 25th

    Though I loved your previous look/feel – I think your new look/feel is just as good.

  3. Wolfgang Bartelme Wolfgang Bartelme said on September 25th

    Great redesign. Love the new color scheme. Two thumbs up.

  4. Jonathan Snook Jonathan Snook said on September 25th

    Nice work! The only thing that I noticed, and it might have been a result of porting over the data but the RSS feed shows almost all posts with a pubDate of today.

  5. Nate Cavanaugh Nate Cavanaugh said on September 25th

    At the risk of being very spammy, I would say that our CMS, Expanse (http://expansecms.com plug plug) has gotten quite a bit of kudos for our interface.

    It is PHP only, so no rails, but we actually made smart design decisions when we made it, unlike most interfaces.

    I talked a bit about it here: http://blog.expansecms.com

    Hopefully this isn’t too self-aggrandizing, but I just thought I would share.

    Now get back to the prototype instructional goodness my friend :)

  6. Will Duncan Will Duncan said on September 26th

    well, i didn’t even notice the downtime if that makes you feel anybetter. And you were probably up late because I nag you all night long about studpid stuff…lol. Nice work though. Outside the commenters link issue on the main page, I havent noticed anything out of place yet.

  7. Scott Scott said on September 26th

    Justin, the new site looks great. You’re really making me want to move my stuff all over to Mephisto…

  8. nicolas nicolas said on September 26th

    i liked the old design already the new one is even better. You could implement the pullquotes script from 456 baretta street then you wouldn’t have to duplicate your pullquotes. (hope the form accepts urls): http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200609/automatic_pullquotes_with_javascript_and_css/

  9. Nicolas Sanguinetti Nicolas Sanguinetti said on September 29th
    Wow! This is great :) I was going to move to Mephisto. Now I know I have to ;) The only thing I don't quite like about the new design is the lack of contrast in the header. The logo gets easily lost in the light blue background, but apart from that, great redesign. Thumbs up man!
  10. Scott Scott said on October 6th
    Justin, Looks great. Nice work mate. I'll get you those files you requested later Saturday or early Sunday. Cheers.
  11. Spiken Spiken said on October 8th
    Where do I download the design?

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