Two Second Memory

For the past few months I’ve been writing a new blogging engine for Limes & Lycopene. It is written in Ruby on Rails and is designed to provide the functionality need for a blogging engine but nothing more. Although i’ve tried to make it fairly minimal I’ve put some effort into doing the Right Thing™, for example the search functionality is quite sophisticated. If you want to search for ‘lycopene’ in the title you would enter title:lycopene.

Now I know most people at this stage say why on earth would you write you own blogging engine there are loads of them out there. And that would be a fair question! There are a number of reasons:

• The blog is going to part of a much bigger system and I didn’t want to have to maintain and integrate a third party blog.
• The existing blog (Wordpress) is extremely unreliable. To give you an example of what I mean I have a script that runs every minute and makes a five request to the blog, if the requests time out after five seconds I restart the server. The server is sometimes restarted 20 times a day. Yes I know it is widely used and therefore “must be reliable for me it isn’t.
• Google Analytics would not work on Kathryn’s site but would work on mine. This seems to be a product of the theme.
• The page used to write posts can only be described as evil (yes I know you can change it).
• Wordpress is written using php which is being run using fcgi under lightty and is not a particularly elegant solution and uses a fair amount of memory (see this post for more details). The machine that runs Limes & Lycopene is a small memory constrained Xen VM and the less running on that machine the better.
• I wanted to gain more experience using ruby on rails.

So on Saturday afternoon I released the new engine, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, mainly due to exporting the existing data from Wordpress, but it is now done (and the export only needs to be done once). There are a number of defects that need to be fixed but are not serious enough to delay the release. I have to say that I’m very pleased with the results and my admiration for rails has increased dramatically. Let me know what you think.

I would also like to thank Styleshout for there fantastic website template and an even bigger thank you for releasing it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. I had been looking for an open source site design for quite a while before I found pixel green so thank you, thank you, thank you.

As I mentioned above there are still a few defect to fix up and some more functionality that really does need to be added but once I’ve done that I will be releasing it under the GPL license. If anyone has any bright ideas for a name please let me know!

Filed by rgh at 18:27 under Internet