mephisto – nanoRAILS

Big sigh of relief…

… and yes, everything went fine. Well, mostly. If something looks amiss, please use the brand new feedback page (thanks Rick!) to let me know. I’ve tried to redirect most existing urls to their new ones as Mephisto and Typo slightly differ on how they generate the permalink portion, but may have missed a few (so if you get an error page when something used to work, please do let me know!).

After much hesitation, and having dreaded the minutiae of the conversion, I’ve finally made it!

In fact it was the switch to a brand new VPS with a 1Gb of memory that was the trigger. Since I was reinstalling everything from scratch (more on that shortly), I figured now was the time to bite the bullet. And it went much easier than I expected :). I’ll try to put down some notes on some the pitfalls to avoid within a few days.

Suffice it to say that I’m quite happy with the result and this blog is now running with nginx (yeah!!!) and a cluster of mongrels on a fined tune gentoo vps (I’ve kept detailed notes that I will share soon).

I’ve also ported the Brighthouse theme by Richard White to Mephisto and will add it to the Mephisto Theme Gallery as soon as I get to clean it up and remove the nano RAILS specific stuff. In fact, I’m curious as to whether you would rather have the theme with AdSense and TextLinkAds:http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=14245 (aff) included, or maybe the ability to turn them on/off?

Also new is the Archives page, and hopefully the new error page will help people find what they were looking for.

What started as a 5 minutes hack a few weeks ago is now a reality. I’ve put together a new gallery, and unlike many other galleries, you get to see all the existing themes for Mephisto as they would appear in a real Mephisto installation, because that’s where they all run. All sites show the same content, which makes it really easy to find out how each one treats sections, static pages, comments, sidebars, etc.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the most extensive collection of Mephisto designs to date! It contains 34 templates (and would contain more if it was not for the fact that the license did not allow for free redistribution).

Some may require extra Mephisto plugins such as the ERB, Erubis or HAML renderers. Speaking of HAML, I’m going to be releasing a new template within a few days to demonstrate how you can use the HAML renderer for Mephisto.

I’m also officially introducing a new Mephisto theme: Cutline, very accurately translated from the original Cutline Template by Chris Pearson. This is a gorgeous design, with a clean layout, plenty of white space and very precise typography.

I’ll be posting some more details in the following days about why that 5 minutes hack turned out into a much bigger project, but I think the result is quite impressive, and a hats off to Rick for creating an impressive blog engine.