Derek’s Diary

Last night, a small group of Ruby Montreal members met for the second Ruby Montreal Minga. Though there were just three of us in attendence compared with the eight who attended the first meeting, it was a more personal and focused meeting. We reviewed chapter 4 of the book Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition and started chapter 5. We plan to meet again in about two weeks to continue where we left off.

In case you don’t know, Ruby Minga is group of Ruby enthusiasts in Montreal who meet regularly to study Ruby programming related topics.

I just installed the Typo blog engine on my website in about 45 minutes, which included the time it took to configure the Apache proxy, but did not included content customization or migration from my existing blogs. Even though the installation includes an example Apache proxy configuration template, the proxy configuration took about 80% to 90% of the total installation time. However, installing Typo itself was practically a no-brainer:

$ sudo gem install typo
(answer a few yes/no prompts)
$ sudo typo install /var/www/typo

These two commands install Ruby on Rails (if it’s not already installed), Mongrel, Typo, SQLite3, and some additional Rails plugins. Starting Typo was equally painless:

$ sudo typo start
$ sudo typo start /var/www/typo
Starting Typo on port 4231
$ ps -eaf --width=2000 | grep typo
root 15286 1 5 15:41 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start /var/www/typo -d false -e production -P /var/www/typo/tmp/pid.txt -p 4231

The first time that you load the Typo blog URL into your web browser, Typo asks you to enter a user name and password, and then promptly takes you to the Administration page. The Typo Administration page looks pretty slick and provides options similar to those that Wordpress offers, but it’s far more responsive than Wordpress at Blogsome. I’m not sure whether this is because Typo is more performant than Wordpress or because Blogsome has misconfigured Wordpress or their web servers. In any case, my Typo is snappy!

Interestingly, this post took me about 45 minutes to write, or same amount of time that it took me to install Typo. Wow, that’s fast!