Mephisto on Bluehost
Stumbled across Mephisto today. It’s a Rails-based blogging system, and dang does it look good. ~drool~ I am pleased with WordPress, mind you, and it’s treated me well, but I’d really really really love to blog on a Rails blogging app so I could tweak things in Ruby instead of PHP. I like what little I’ve seen of Mephisto, too.
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to install it on my servers, though, because you have to be running Edge Rails (revision 4727), and Bluehost has 1.1.6. Nor do I think they’d upgrade their servers just for me. :) Beyond that, it helps if you can install gems, but I can’t. Time to post to the forums…
The other thing is that this is a project I can actually see myself contributing to. WordPress could have got a few lines of PHP out of me, but coding Ruby for Mephisto would be quite fun. If I can get it installed, the first thing I’m going to write is a WordPress-to-Mephisto converter so I can move all my blogs over.
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I tried to make Mephisto shared-host-friendly by including all the gems it needs. It doesn’t include tzinfo, because its a fairly large gem. But, it’s very easy to unpack the gem and upload it. As for edge rails, you can just check it out yourself:
svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk vendor/rails -r 4727
Here’s info on gem unpacking: http://mephistoblog.com/2006/8/8/installing-mephisto-without-required-gems
Thanks, Rick. Did that and followed the gem unpacking instructions (the first time I read them, I didn’t understand that gem:freeze would create a directory, but it’s pretty clear now that I reread it — duh :)). Got it all up on my server but now I’m getting “Application error: Rails application failed to start properly”. Rails does work — I just ran “rails test” and was able to get to /test/public/ just fine — so something else must be wrong. I ran Rake to see if the test cases would succeed, and they all did. I also tried adding a subdomain (in case it didn’t want to be installed in a subdirectory, for some bizarre reason), but that made no difference. The databases were created correctly (as the tests confirmed).
Hmm…
Please do post a detailed error message to the mephisto mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/MephistoBlog). I’m afraid “Application Error” is a generic message and won’t really help out much. However, I haven’t heard of many issues if you freeze to rails edge 4727 (the install docs mention this) and have the proper gems, provided your web server stuff is up to snuff.
I wish I had a detailed error message to post, but all I get is that Application Error message. I did install Mephisto (from SVN) locally on my PowerMac, and it worked fine, so I think Bluehost’s web server isn’t up to snuff. (The installation was basically identical.) I’ll look into it some more later and see if I can find a way to fix it…
[…] As you may’ve noticed if you read the blog directly instead of through an aggregator, I’ve been messing around with the sidebar. It’s still way too long, though, but a thorough fix will have to wait till I redo the entire design. (And possibly switch to Mephisto.) I’m thinking of moving both the Archives and the Categories lists into dropdown boxes, which will save a ton of space. I’m debating the merits of having Contact Me, My Sites, New Bookmarks, Flickr, and LibraryThing on the sidebar — they really could go in an About Me page or something like that. Hmm… Oh, I’ve also bumped up the number of recent comments displayed to 10 (from seven). […]