Global Reset

Always one to chase after the shiny new technology, I’ve moved my blog over to Typo from Wordpress. Typo is a recent blogging engine developed using the latest buzzworthy web framework Ruby on Rails. I’ve been meaning to experiment with Ruby on Rails for a while now, and I guess Typo is a good start. One of the first differences you’ll notice is that Typo is AJAX-ified with a handy “Live Search” dialog over there on the right-hand side. This provides a pretty nifty instant search interface, with a transparent round-trip to the server. So you get something that looks somewhat like a local application, much like most of GMail’s functionality. Getting Typo running on Dreamhost wasn’t nearly as straightforward as Wordpress. Here’s the steps I followed:

1. Used Subversion to do a checkout on my local Mac of the latest Typo source (svn co svn://leetsoft.com/typo/trunk trunk).
2. Used the Dreamhost Web Panel to add the IP address of my local Mac to the allowed IP addresses that can access my mysql database.
3. Used CocoaMySQL to make a dump of my existing database (in case I screwed anything up) using the Export->”CocoaMySQL Dump” menu option.
4. Used CocoaMySQL to import the schema required for Typo (I imported it into the same database as my Wordpress install) using the Import->”CocoaMySQL Dump” menu option and selecting the db/schemas.mysql.sql file.
5. I used Cyberduck to ftp the Typo files into mywebsite/typo folder.
6. Made some necessary files executable (chmod +x script/ public/).
7. Browsed to http://mywebsite/typo/public to configure the installation.
8. Ran db/converters/wordpress.rb to import my Wordpress database into Typo.
9. Made a backup of the Wordress blog php files (moved /blog to /blog2).
10. Used the Dreamhost Web Panel to make a new subdomain (blog.globalreset.org).
11. Moved the Typo installation into the subfolder for blog.globalreset.org.
12. Remapped the domain to point to blog.globalreset.org/typo/public as the root folder for the website.

I fought for a while with getting Typo to work under my /blog subfolder of my domain, but it didn’t like it. I followed on the directions on the Rails wiki and in the Dreamhost forum, but couldn’t get it to grok the urls. I gave up and just went with a new subdomain, which Rails apps seem to like.

Also, I couldn’t find any themes I liked for Typo yet, so I started mucking with the default one. I’m not terribly happy with what I’ve ended up with here, but it’ll do for now.

Technorati Tags: RubyOnRails, Typo