So I lied

So the other day I complained about various web applications and promised to hand roll my own one.

I lied.

I started digging a bit more into RoR, and played a bit with customising Typo and got addicted.

A short while later I had a working version of this site up and running, and looking pretty much as you see it now. This was all on a development box on my home network, so happy with the results I decided to take the plunge and push it up to my production server. This is where the trouble began.

I’ve been running a Linode successfully for quite a while now. I’ve always used Apache, but the limited RAM of my configuration just wouldn’t let me run Apache 2 with FastCGI without grinding the box to a halt. I spent a little while chatting to some folk on #rubyonrails and #typo on Freenode, and based on this I started looking into replacing Apache with LightTPD. It took me a while to iron out the creases, but once I’d got it figured out I was seriously impressed.

As you can probably guess, I’ve now made the full transisition – both to a LightTPD and Typo. Some things are broken (I need to figure out a decent redirection system) but generally things are working.

To make life easier for those who use their favourite feed readers, I started using FeedBurner to host/translate my feed. They provide an excellent, free service which includes (amongst other things) translating your feed to the correct formatter for the reader accessing it. This means I don’t need to worry about a) providing multiple feeds and b) updating/redirecting feeds if I change software again. For the record, the old textpattern RSS and atom feeds are now being redirected. Another nice feature of FeedBarner is that it combines feeds automagically, so my new feed contains content from both this site and my del.icio.us tags. In time I will (probably) also add my Flickr feed to the mix as well. Guess I’ll have to upload some photos first though!

My new feed can therefore be found at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/schwuk