Blog City, who used to host this blog, decided that they’d had enough but didn’t seem to tell anyone who had a subscription that was about to lapse. Thanks guys, I’ve been a customer of yours for over 7 years!
I was planning on moving to another site eventually, but not right now because I’ve got too much to do. I was concerned that I was going to lose all that effort, and potentially useful stuff. So went into panic stations mode (I suppose) because I just wanted to get it done and move on to something else.
In the end I did some Unix shell hacking and pulled all of the entries through into a format where I could load them into a Rails application of my choice. I decided to use Xavier Shay’s Enki – it’s minimalist, but there’s enough there to get up and running quickly and it does comments and pages out of the box, which is pretty damn cool. The old blog posts are all now pure HTML and the comments are missing, sorry.
Then the fun started. As it comes out of the box Enki won’t run on the Heroku servers because of some problem with the gems in the Gemfile. I messed about with this for ages and in the end went for the obvious solution.
- Create an empty app with the latest Rails 2 (2.3.10) and see it deploys (tick)
- Copy the migration and app files across and see it still runs (tick)
- Copy in the plugins (tick)
- Let ’er rip and see what gems she needs (tick)
- Put those gems, and those gems only in the Gemfile (tick)
Thar’ she blows!
So I have a version of Enki that isn’t a fork, but a Heroku-friendly pulling across of the core files into 2.3.10. Good news is that moving from this to Rails 3 should be really easy, in fact it might even make sense to repeat the process but with a Rails 3 base. Bad news is that it isn’t a fork and I don’t know how to get it back into Xavier’s main code base.
Imported Comments:
Ruben Berenguel
Congratulations for your move. I have been watching it over twitter. I’m glad it worked out!
Cheers,
Ruben (from mostlymaths.net)