Can't update feeds?

Ruby Apps Typo
1

My Typo blog at new.mischeathen.com has a feed that contains only the
first post ever on that blog, and will not update.

How can I force this to behave properly? It vexes me. :frowning:

Chet F.
[email protected]

“I knew I love you oh various left bye.” – Erin, according to
CallWave’s transcription service, 10/6/2007

2

Le 8 juil. 08 Ă  05:34, Chet F. a Ă©crit :

My Typo blog at new.mischeathen.com has a feed that contains only
the first post ever on that blog, and will not update.

How can I force this to behave properly? It vexes me. :frowning:

Chet F.
[email protected]

Please, give us your Typo version and cache type used.
Fred

–
Frédéric de Villamil
[email protected] tel: +33 (0)6 62 19 1337
http://fredericdevillamil.com Typo : http://typosphere.org

3

On Jul 8, 2008, at 11:25 AM, de Villamil Frédéric wrote:

Please, give us your Typo version and cache type used.
Fred

Mea culpa. I updated my typo install (and the binary is now dated
yesterday) with the most current gem, but the blog itself still
reports 5.0.2. How can I verify this?

The feed issue persists in both static html and semi-dynamic modes.

“Don’t let your mongoose get cold or dirty, or it will die.”
(Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them, by Shaw & Fisher, Dent 1939)

4

I have not been satisfied w/ Typo but I keep on the mailing list.

If you want to do a full site management tool with a blogging engine
and don’t mind PHP then I recommend Drupal.

If you just want a blogging tool then there are two Java ones that I
used to follow that you might be interested in

Or you could just keep on w/ Typo :slight_smile:

rjsjr

5

Apologies. This was intended as a private message to another member.

rjsjr

6

Le 10 juil. 08 Ă  20:20, Robert Sanford a Ă©crit :

well as IBM Developer Works blogs.

Or you could just keep on w/ Typo :slight_smile:

rjsjr

Don’t apologize, this is quite interesting. One of my jobs as a QA
manager is just to get feedback from unsatisfied users in order to
improve the application, and you just seem to fit the role. So please,
tell me more, I’m really looking forward reading what can be improved
here. I would have prefered a patch, but some feedback will be OK too.

–
Frédéric de Villamil
[email protected] tel: +33 (0)6 62 19 1337
http://fredericdevillamil.com Typo : http://typosphere.org

7

On Jul 12, 2008, at 2:43 AM, de Villamil Frédéric wrote:

Don’t apologize, this is quite interesting. One of my jobs as a QA
manager is just to get feedback from unsatisfied users in order to
improve the application, and you just seem to fit the role. So
please, tell me more, I’m really looking forward reading what can be
improved here. I would have prefered a patch, but some feedback will
be OK too.

–
Frédéric de Villamil

Well, Robert was replying to me; it’s my frustration with Typo he’s
addressing.

My first real issue with it is the complexity of its installation, and
the requirements it imposes if you want to run it on the same box with
Apache (i.e., the proxying thing with Mongrel). I found little in the
way of informative installation instructions; mostly I saw step-by-
step guides that explained nothing beyond “do A, B, and C”.

But that’s a basic architecture thing. The Typo leaders decided to
build it this way, despite the extra complexity it demands over a
traditional LAMP-stack-in-a-VHost type deployment. Mileage varies, and
all that.

My major complaints with Typo itself are three-fold:

First, that it does not play nice with MarsEdit or any other local
blogging client. I’m coming to Typo from a long-term Blosxom install
where I wrote in TextMate and rsync’d my posts, and picked Typo
because I thought I’d be able to use ME or even TM’s own blogging
bundle. Unfortunately, neither categories nor tags work properly via
these clients, pushing me back into the web editor. That’s annoying. I
have the online features I wanted but couldn’t get with Blosxom
(mostly comment-related), but have lost functionality w/r/t my actual
posting mechanism.

Second, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get my feeds to
work; see my other posts for more information there.

Third, it’s not at all clear to me how to upgrade. I thought I’d done
it, but my site still reports an old version number.

Any help you can give me would be appreciated! I’d prefer to avoid
WordPress and Moveable Type given what I know about either platform,
but my frustrations with Typo make staying with it a challenge.

Best,

Chet F.
Houston, TX

“Don’t let your mongoose get cold or dirty, or it will die.”
(Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them, by Shaw & Fisher, Dent 1939)

8

Frederic,

Delivering a patch would imply that I could actually write Ruby code
which I would love to be able to do at some point but my brain is
currently stuck in C#, Java and Python


Like I said (or hoped to at least imply) in my email I’ve been
following Typo but haven’t actually used it after my first attempt
over a year ago (much has changed). It still intrigues me so I am
writing back. I am hopeful that Typo will continue to improve as it
has over the past year.

The biggest issues that I had involved installation and configuration.
Rails applications a year ago were not well supported in shared
hosting environments which I was using at the time. I know that
progress has been made by Engine Y. and others on this but it isn’t
a standard setup. That isn’t a Typo issue at all.

The lack of support for client software was a killer. Obviously you’ve
done quite a bit of work on that.

As you noted in your response to Chet there have been caching issues
which, while recently fixed, have been annoying. There seems (my
current perception which may not be grounded in fact) to be one issue
similar to that every two or three “releases” that get quickly fixed
but affect users.

One thing that seems odd to me is that for what seems to be one of the
top three blog server applications written in Rails (see Mephisto and
Radiant) the level of traffic on the list seems really, really low.
The apparent level of interest makes me take a second look and wonder
why.

Compared to full-blown CMS applications such as Joomla and Drupal the
feature set is pretty small.

Ruby doesn’t scale :slight_smile:

rjsjr

9

Well, Robert was replying to me; it’s my frustration with Typo he’s
addressing.

2 feedbacks are still better than one, thank you for yours

My first real issue with it is the complexity of its installation,
and the requirements it imposes if you want to run it on the same
box with Apache (i.e., the proxying thing with Mongrel). I found
little in the way of informative installation instructions; mostly I
saw step-by-step guides that explained nothing beyond “do A, B, and
C”.

There are actually lots of way to run Typo, or any Rails app. Let’s
say :
– Apache + mongrel
– Apache + mod_rails (my favourite, and the easiest way imho, just run
mod_rails 1.5 since 1.9 and beyond have issues with the memory). Check
at http://typosphere.org/2007/08/26/install-typo#apache_modrails
– Apache + fastcgi
– Nginx + thin
– Nginx + mongrel
– Lighttpd + thin
– Ligthtpd + mongrel
– Lighttpd + fastcgo

And I may forget some of them.

But that’s a basic architecture thing. The Typo leaders decided to
build it this way, despite the extra complexity it demands over a
traditional LAMP-stack-in-a-VHost type deployment. Mileage varies,
and all that.

The traditionnal LAMP stack implies you’re using PHP. Typo is Ruby on
Rails, and thus, was a bit more difficult to deploy until recently.
Check mod_rails at http://modrails.com, these guys may help you going
to simplicity LAMR-in-a-vhost.

actual posting mechanism.
It’s at the same time a bug AND an absent feature.
– The categories issue has been fixed in the trunk and this will be in
the next release, if not already (I’m damn too much lazy to check now)
– The tags is a missing feature, mostly because the guy who added them
was not blogging using an external client and then didn’t think about
them. I myself never used such a client until recently, for debugging
purpose. And guess what, it was for the above point.

Second, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get my feeds to
work; see my other posts for more information there.

We’ve been having lots of cache issues which have been fixed in the
trunk, and the lateste release as well. Try to manually remove your
feed files from public/. It should be articles.rss or articles.atom,
don’t know which ones you use. These bugs made me realize I really
should extend our tests coverage.

Third, it’s not at all clear to me how to upgrade. I thought I’d
done it, but my site still reports an old version number.

It’s actually pretty easy. I’ve always written doc on how to install
Typo, not about how to upgrade it. Another thing added to my TODO list
before the next release. I wish days were 50 hours.

Don’t know how you installed typo, but you can just unpack Typo in
your current directory and have it overwrite your old apps files.
Restart your application and run rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
if you’re running in production mode (and please, do it, it’s VERY
important since you won’t be able for that time to access the database
upgrade page in your admin)

Any help you can give me would be appreciated! I’d prefer to avoid
WordPress and Moveable Type given what I know about either platform,
but my frustrations with Typo make staying with it a challenge.

I stopped using wordpress which I was a contributor since the B2 era
for typo because I was so much pissed off with it.
Hope this will, haven’t written a so long mail in English for ages,
hope I didn’t do too much mistakes

Cheers,
Frédéric

–
Frédéric de Villamil
[email protected] tel: +33 (0)6 62 19 1337
http://fredericdevillamil.com Typo : http://typosphere.org

10

Chet F. wrote:

Sure, but “LAMP” has been extended to mean most Linux + Apache + (some
open source DB) + (some interprested language). I’ve seen stuff with
Perl or Python plus Postgres referred to as “LAMP” b/c the
installation was a simple matter of bringing up another virtual host
under apache and installing the right module. Follow?

Typo is part of a whole different tradition (the Rails world). I don’t
fault it just because of that; I just dislike the additional complexity.
Hi, Chet. I’m running Apache2, Ruby on Rails for my blog
(http://blog.jkl5group.com) and honestly, I found the install trivial


In /etc/apache2/sites-available I have “vhost.jkl5group.com” which
contains:

ServerName blog.jkl5group.com

Change this to your email address

ServerAdmin [email protected]

Change these to be valid paths for your host. The DocumentRoot path

isn’t very important because we don’t actually use it for anything.

For security’s sake, it’s best that it points to an empty directory,

but that’s not critical.

DocumentRoot /home/jkl5groupcom/public_html/blog
ErrorLog /home/jkl5groupcom/webLogs.d/blog_error.log
CustomLog /home/jkl5groupcom/webLogs.d/blog_access.log combined

ServerSignature On

This is the important part–it sets up proxying.

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all

ProxyPass / http://webhost.mydomain.ca:4820/
ProxyPassReverse / http://webhost.mydomain.ca:4820/
ProxyPreserveHost On

In /etc/init.d I have “typo_jkl5blog” which contains:

typo start /home/jkl5groupcom/public_html/jkl5blog


 “It Just Works”. I’m not getting “hundreds of hits per second”, of
course, but really, this is working just fine. Let me know if you need
a bit of info or advice.

–

–Michel R Vaillancourt
JKL-5 Telephony Services
“The center of your telephony service needs”

Phone: +1.514.907.9429
eMail: [email protected]
World Wide Web: http://www.jkl5group.com/support

11

To whomever it may concern,

I notice the common thread here. How to deploy typo?

There is many ways to deploy typo, the most common is

  1. FastCGI. (It’s also the most murky confusing documentation imo, I
    don’t blame this on typo, I blame this on FastCGI Documentation and
    the people who wrote it).
  2. Mongrel/Webrick
  3. Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails?)

Now, there’s no real difference with Mongrel/Webrick if you run nginx
or Apache or lighttpd. It works, it’s well documented and takes the
most amount of memory (actually all of them really take the same
amount of memory, you just don’t see the ruby process hanging around
using up 140megs of memory). Phusion Passenger
 Excellent option,
if you have a cheap Dreamhost.com account that is going to be your
easiest option, documentation is decent and it’s much easier to deploy.

So there you have it, 3 basic methods to deploy your blog. If your
coding Ruby on Rails chances are this is nothing new to you, and you
have no problem with it. But those who have come from the “PHP
Boat” (as we’ll call it, a/k/a wordpress, etc) they just untar files
into a directory edit a few files, loadup their web browser and bam.
It works. This is because the company behind PHP has spent a great
deal of time and money at making PHP the dominant language. It
doesn’t make it better, or worse or anything. (It scales horribly
also for those of you who are talking about scaling). Let’s say you
grab a Perl based blog, what’s your common problem? Well mod_perl,
perl with ithreads enabled. Yeah you can use it as a cgi script and
have it exec perl on each page/function. But again, we’ll go with it
does not scale well. We have Python and django, I know have not
touched any of the django software really so I won’t go there.

So let’s bust out some simple myths,

Rails is hard to deploy, FALSE. In fact Ruby on Rails Applications
are quite easy to deploy provided your hosting company gives you an
environment where it can deploy sanely. This is something that DHH
has commented on a few times; there is no way to make the pain of
deploying a Ruby on Rails app on a “bad/cheap hosting server” go
away. Is that the fault of Ruby on Rails? or the company you chose to
host with? I’ll let you decide on that one.

Rails does not scale, FALSE. Ruby on Rails does Scale well if the
developers write the application with scaling in mind. Put the Rails
app behind a Local Traffic Manager, and inject parts of the page to be
pulled from services like Akami and other various things. Look at
Twitter and other Ruby on Rails based web apps. Anyone who tells you
that Ruby on Rails is not enterprise ready, lied to you. Ask for your
money back and tell them to get the heck out of your office.

Any questions? good great.

There is alternatives to Ruby on Rails, such as Merb
(http://www.merbivore.com/
). You can read the website about it, it’s interesting, it’s thread-
safe and it’s quite exciting. Which brings me to Featherblog
(http://featherblog.org
). It’s currently a work in progress and is in no way shape or
fashion complete. However it’s extremely fast, and will be more
lightweight. One of the developers of it (eldiablo)'s web site is
running feather at http://crazycool.co.uk

My single point of this post is that there is great documentation (for
the most part) on how to deploy Typo, or any other Rails app. I will
freely admit that the last decent version of typo in my personal
opinion was typo 4.1.1. That whole Rails 2.0 version really jaded me,
and now Rails 2.1 is out. Makes me more jaded, and is making me walk
away from Rails as a viable option. They are throwing out more and
more versions, and quite frankly I have not kept up, I need to buy the
new version of Pragmatic Programmers for Rails 2
 which is already
out of date as 2.1 is released :frowning:

I think the best thing I can say out of this, is if your having a
problem deploying Typo (or anything else) please file a bug, write an
email, give as much detail as you can. The more detail the better, so
the developers of typo can find and squash the bugs. Remember, if you
don’t raise your voice, you don’t say this is broken; you have failed
the community. Just as much as you have failed the community if you
fix what is broken, without reporting it and giving a patch so it can
be addressed. Not everyone is a developer, not everyone can program
ruby on rails. But Frédéric cannot fix a bug he is not aware of, nor
can Piers.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Likens

12

On Jul 12, 2008, at 5:02 PM, de Villamil Frédéric wrote:

Well, Robert was replying to me; it’s my frustration with Typo he’s
addressing.

2 feedbacks are still better than one, thank you for yours

Hey, glad to. BTW, I’m gonna go ahead and address this:

Hope this will, haven’t written a so long mail in English for ages,
hope I didn’t do too much mistakes

Your English is very, very good. I don’t have any trouble
understanding you.

– Apache + mod_rails (my favourite, and the easiest way imho, just
run mod_rails 1.5 since 1.9 and beyond have issues with the memory).
Check at http://typosphere.org/2007/08/26/install-typo#apache_modrails
– Apache + fastcgi
– Nginx + thin
– Nginx + mongrel
– Lighttpd + thin
– Ligthtpd + mongrel
– Lighttpd + fastcgo

And I may forget some of them.

Well, if there’s some great documentation for installing it under
mod_rails, I’d love to see it – I’ll check out the link you provide.
I just didn’t find much along those lines when I went to install Typo
initially. Right now, it’s on a Slicehost instance with no Apache, but
I’d love to be able to run other stuff under an Apache instance there.

But that’s a basic architecture thing. The Typo leaders decided to
build it this way, despite the extra complexity it demands over a
traditional LAMP-stack-in-a-VHost type deployment. Mileage varies,
and all that.

The traditionnal LAMP stack implies you’re using PHP. Typo is Ruby
on Rails, and thus, was a bit more difficult to deploy until
recently. Check mod_rails at http://modrails.com, these guys may
help you going to simplicity LAMR-in-a-vhost.

Sure, but “LAMP” has been extended to mean most Linux + Apache + (some
open source DB) + (some interprested language). I’ve seen stuff with
Perl or Python plus Postgres referred to as “LAMP” b/c the
installation was a simple matter of bringing up another virtual host
under apache and installing the right module. Follow?

Typo is part of a whole different tradition (the Rails world). I don’t
fault it just because of that; I just dislike the additional complexity.

them was not blogging using an external client and then didn’t think
about them. I myself never used such a client until recently, for
debugging purpose. And guess what, it was for the above point.

So should I expect both of these to get resolved, or no?

Second, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get my feeds
to work; see my other posts for more information there.

We’ve been having lots of cache issues which have been fixed in the
trunk, and the lateste release as well. Try to manually remove your
feed files from public/. It should be articles.rss or articles.atom,
don’t know which ones you use. These bugs made me realize I really
should extend our tests coverage.

Well, doing so brought my feeds up to date, but the feed fell behind
again the minute I posted something new – i.e., new articles don’t
show up in the feed, so the problem is still there.

Does Typo not have a 100% dynamic mode?

RAILS_ENV=production if you’re running in production mode (and
please, do it, it’s VERY important since you won’t be able for that
time to access the database upgrade page in your admin)

How can I verify my Typo version?

Any help you can give me would be appreciated! I’d prefer to avoid
WordPress and Moveable Type given what I know about either
platform, but my frustrations with Typo make staying with it a
challenge.

I stopped using wordpress which I was a contributor since the B2 era
for typo because I was so much pissed off with it.

Honestly, the real alternative isn’t WP. It’s either MT or Drupal.

Chet

“An educated public is exactly what they don’t want . . . more people
believe in angels than believe in long division.” R. Norris 31 May 2006

13

Look. I like Typo. I’m still trying to use it. But mails like this
just tick me off. They provide no help to speak of while insisting
there is no problem.

Also, proofreading is a good idea.

On Jul 15, 2008, at 10:22 PM, Scott L. wrote:

To whomever it may concern,

I reckon that would be me, among others.

I notice the common thread here. How to deploy typo?

Why do you think that is?

The choices are:

a) Typo IS hard to deploy; or
b) Typo isn’t hard to deploy, but is poorly documented; or
c) Typo isn’t hard to deploy, and is well documented, but the
documentation is hard to find; or
d) The people posting this question are all idiots.

Hint: It isn’t (d), and (a), (b), and (c) are functionally identical.

takes the most amount of memory (actually all of them really take
the same amount of memory, you just don’t see the ruby process
hanging around using up 140megs of memory).

Um, no. It is NOT well documented, or, if it is, those documents are
not easy to find. They’re not complete at Typosphere, and they’re not
apparent anywhere else I looked. I saw rote, by-the-numbers list dox,
but nothing that explained why I was doing what it said to do, or what
the rationale was behind Mongrel vs. mod_ruby, or anything an admin
will want to know when making the choices that are part of an
installation. If those docs exist and I somehow missed them, I will
GLEEFULLY accept pointers.

Phusion Passenger
 Excellent option, if you have a cheap
Dreamhost.com account that is going to be your easiest option,
documentation is decent and it’s much easier to deploy.

First I’ve heard of it. Maybe it’s a great choice; I have no idea. I
wish I’d known about it when I first started playing with Typo.

So there you have it, 3 basic methods to deploy your blog.

You say this as though your post constitutes instructions. This is not
the case.

If your coding Ruby on Rails chances are this is nothing new to you,
and you have no problem with it. But those who have come from the
“PHP Boat” (as we’ll call it, a/k/a wordpress, etc) they just untar
files into a directory edit a few files, loadup their web browser
and bam. It works.

Yup. Nice, too. This is, above perhaps all else, why a “bad” language
(PHP) has earned such a dominant market position.

This is because the company behind PHP has spent a great deal of
time and money at making PHP the dominant language.

Er, and PHP itself, or mod_php, or whatever, pretty much Just Works
without installing half a dozen more components, proxies, etc. This
ease of use took effort, it’s true, but it also provides nontrivial
value.

It doesn’t make it better, or worse or anything. (It scales
horribly also for those of you who are talking about scaling).

Actually, “easy to deploy” DOES earn an app significant points with
pretty much any administrator I know. I consider that “better.”

Let’s say you grab a Perl based blog, what’s your common problem?
Well mod_perl, perl with ithreads enabled. Yeah you can use it as a
cgi script and have it exec perl on each page/function. But again,
we’ll go with it does not scale well. We have Python and django, I
know have not touched any of the django software really so I won’t
go there.

Do you have a point here?

So let’s bust out some simple myths,

Rails is hard to deploy, FALSE. In fact Ruby on Rails Applications
are quite easy to deploy provided your hosting company gives you an
environment where it can deploy sanely.

Is this a synonym for “provided your hoster does it for you?” Because
I’ve installed Rails on several different *nixes over the years, and
have never found it to be simple to get running in a production
environment (i.e., ignoring quickie dev stacks like Locomotive).

This is something that DHH has commented on a few times; there is
no way to make the pain of deploying a Ruby on Rails app on a “bad/
cheap hosting server” go away. Is that the fault of Ruby on Rails?
or the company you chose to host with? I’ll let you decide on that
one.

If “application stack A” installs quickly and cleanly, and
“application stack DHH” doesn’t, do I care? I’ll let you decide on
that one.

Shared hosting does not equal bad hosting. It’s totally appropriate
for probably 85-95% of the blogs that exist. Being essentially
incompatible with shared hosting environments is a bad move for Rails,
and DHH saying otherwise doesn’t make it so. Being hard to get running
in a hosted environment makes Ruby on Rails less appealing, and
therefore hurts Typo.

Rails does not scale, FALSE.

I wager “scaling” matters to virtually zero Typo installations. It’s
too unfinished to support a high traffic blog.

As for Rails itself, I don’t care. It’s not on my professional radar
for several reasons. It might be someday.

Look at Twitter

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

and other Ruby on Rails based web apps. Anyone who tells you that
Ruby on Rails is not enterprise ready, lied to you. Ask for your
money back and tell them to get the heck out of your office.

I smell a fanboy.

My single point of this post is that there is great documentation
(for the most part) on how to deploy Typo, or any other Rails app.

Too bad you didn’t see fit to provide links to any of it here.

I will freely admit that the last decent version of typo in my
personal opinion was typo 4.1.1. That whole Rails 2.0 version
really jaded me, and now Rails 2.1 is out. Makes me more jaded, and
is making me walk away from Rails as a viable option.

Wow. Just wow. Now we get to the Typo portion of your post, and you
tell me the current revision isn’t as good as 4.1.1. This is really
helpful.

Not.

I think the best thing I can say out of this, is if your having a
problem deploying Typo (or anything else) please file a bug, write
an email, give as much detail as you can. The more detail the
better, so the developers of typo can find and squash the bugs.

This list is so low traffic as to be mistaken for dead. There’s not
much in terms of Typo discussion anywhere else I can find (the name
collision with Typo3 doesn’t help; I don’t know whose fault that is).

Remember, if you don’t raise your voice, you don’t say this is
broken; you have failed the community. Just as much as you have
failed the community if you fix what is broken, without reporting it
and giving a patch so it can be addressed. Not everyone is a
developer, not everyone can program ruby on rails. But Frédéric
cannot fix a bug he is not aware of, nor can Piers.

I don’t anyone is likely, ever, to accuse me of suffering in silence.
I’ve been clear from the get-go that, while I find Typo overly complex
to install, I got past that part and that my main problems now are
functionality and bugs with the system.

Frederic has, of late, responded fairly quickly to some of my messages
– but Typo itself is still essentially broken on some serious points
(editor support and feed updates come to mind). That’s frustrating,
and it’s frustration that piles on top of the leftover annoyances
associated with Typo’s installation problems.

I want to use Typo. I really do. I’m not a naive noob. But it’s not
perfect, and neither is Rails.

Chet

... the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond
Across a cash crop car lot filled with twilight Coupe Devilles,
Leaving the town in the keeping
Of the one who is sweeping
Up the ghosts of Saturday night...

Tom Waits.
14

Chet F. wrote:

Now, there’s no real difference with Mongrel/Webrick if you run nginx
or Apache or lighttpd. It works, it’s well documented and takes the
most amount of memory (actually all of them really take the same
amount of memory, you just don’t see the ruby process hanging around
using up 140megs of memory).

Um, no. It is NOT well documented, or, if it is, those documents are not
easy to find.

I’ll certainly agree with that. Getting mongrel working with mod_proxy
was essentially an exercise in Google and reading blogs.

It doesn’t make it better, or worse or anything. (It scales horribly
also for those of you who are talking about scaling).

Actually, “easy to deploy” DOES earn an app significant points with
pretty much any administrator I know. I consider that “better.”

Yes. And, frankly, Ruby + gems on most Linux distros is in such a state
that I end up maintaining my own Ruby install from source. Given the
pain of the recent security holes (for example), I find that this is
actually driving me to think I should can it and go for the same suite
of PHP apps as everyone else.

15

On Jul 16, 2008, at 12:14 AM, Rodger D. wrote:

mod_proxy was essentially an exercise in Google and reading blogs.
Why is mod_proxy working with mongrel such an exercise?

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all

ProxyPass / http://localhost:4485
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:4485
ProxyPreserveHost On

That’s it as a whole, 7 whole lines. Add that to your apache
configuration in a Virtualhost area for your blog and startup typo and
you should be golden.

It doesn’t make it better, or worse or anything. (It scales
horribly also for those of you who are talking about scaling).
Actually, “easy to deploy” DOES earn an app significant points with
pretty much any administrator I know. I consider that “better.”

Yes. And, frankly, Ruby + gems on most Linux distros is in such a
state that I end up maintaining my own Ruby install from source.
Given the pain of the recent security holes (for example), I find
that this is actually driving me to think I should can it and go for
the same suite of PHP apps as everyone else.

I will agree with that, as Debian Etch currently has Ruby 1.8.4(2? i
forget) with Rubygems 0.92. However is that Ruby’s problem? or the
Linux distribution you chose? If they are willing to give you that
old of Ruby, what makes you think the PHP is any more recent?


 Now I agree they should update that to at least 1.8.6, and
Rubygems 1.2.0, however they have their release cycle and unless it’s
a critical security fix you will never get it until the next release.
Ubuntu’s way of handling Ruby is quite odd to say the least. I tried
CentOS 5 out of the box, got Warehouseapp running for a customer in a
matter of minutes however. yum worked perfectly for me, and I had 0
issues with it. I’ve tried Gentoo and it’s worked excellent also, so
perhaps some research is in order?

16

On Jul 16, 2008, at 6:10 AM, Scott L. wrote:

I’ll certainly agree with that. Getting mongrel working with
mod_proxy was essentially an exercise in Google and reading blogs.

Why is mod_proxy working with mongrel such an exercise?

Beats me. Perhaps you should refer to the first portion of my reply to
you last night.

It’s clearly a problem, though. It’s also a problem that the purpose
of Mongrel isn’t made clear; you just have to take on faith that it’s
something you need to do based on the sketchy installation guide.

Yes. And, frankly, Ruby + gems on most Linux distros is in such a
state that I end up maintaining my own Ruby install from source.
Given the pain of the recent security holes (for example), I find
that this is actually driving me to think I should can it and go
for the same suite of PHP apps as everyone else.

I will agree with that, as Debian Etch currently has Ruby 1.8.4(2? i
forget) with Rubygems 0.92. However is that Ruby’s problem? or the
Linux distribution you chose?

It’s definitely Ruby’s problem if PHP, Perl, Python, etc., are all
running fine out of the box.

Here, you’re defaulting back to a knee-jerk defense of what is clearly
your pet language. That has no place here. Compared to LAMP-stack
stuff, RoR applications are much harder to set up and deploy. They
require a totally different approach, and that approach is very poorly
documented. This isn’t a controversial statement.

“Don’t let your mongoose get cold or dirty, or it will die.”
(Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them, by Shaw & Fisher, Dent 1939)

17

On Jul 16, 2008, at 6:04 AM, Scott L. wrote:

Which portion of the documentation needs to be revised? FastCGI?
Mongrel?

Honestly, all of it. I know that’s a broad answer, but it’s the truth.
Compare the installation experience of a LAMP stack tool to Typo’s and
you’ll see the huge gap.

In particular, deeper descriptions of why Mongrel needs to be
involved, what the alternatives to a Mongrel configuration are, and
why one might choose one approach over the other are ALL questions
that need to be addressed. I made that clear in my prior post.

Typo is imo extremely easy to deploy and get up in running in under
5 minutes.

Here, you’re just plain wrong.

If your having a problem deploying typo please elaborate and tell
us what the problem is with you deploying Typo so we can help you
deploy it?

I had problems getting mine to run, that’s certainly true. But at this
point my Typo runs (just not in the way I really want it do; the
machine can’t also run Apache – as, again, I’ve made clear before).

My issues are bugs in Typo. If I can’t get those bugs resolved, Typo’s
quirky and difficult installation issues will become academic, as I’ll
have to migrate to something else. The important bugs to ME are:

– my feeds do not dynamically update. They get created when first
requested, but are then frozen in amber.

– Typo does not work properly with MarsEdit or other stand-alone
editors. This is a show-stopper for me.

I also have some other outstanding questions regarding updating my
Typo, and verifying the version I have, but those are in another mail
I posted early yesterday, I believe, and are part of a dialog with
Frederic.

  • How do I verify what version of Typo I have?
  • How is it best to upgrade Typo? What specific steps should be taken,
    and why?

“They say no mortal woman was enough for him so he made one himself
outta whiskey an liquors an ale,” says me. “An he loved her like a
lumberjack made of eating loves a woman made of ham.” (Fafblog
2004-08-05)

18

Le 16 juil. 08 Ă  15:43, Chet F. a Ă©crit :

involved, what the alternatives to a Mongrel configuration are, and

deploy it?

  • How do I verify what version of Typo I have?
  • How is it best to upgrade Typo? What specific steps should be
    taken, and why?

“They say no mortal woman was enough for him so he made one himself
outta whiskey an liquors an ale,” says me. “An he loved her like a
lumberjack made of eating loves a woman made of ham.” (Fafblog
2004-08-05)

Hi,

First, sorry if I took the day replying to you, I couldn’t reach my
email before. I’ll try to be quick because I have to finish the next
stable version I plan to release next sunday.

– The lack of Typo doc :
This thread just made me realize we don’t have any documentation about
upgrading Typo. This needs to be written and added both on the website
and a static UPGRADE file coming along with Typo. I’ll try to do this
tonight if I don t fall asleep, I really had a hard day. I’ll aso
complete the existing install docs and make clearer how to access the
on the website. They are a little bit confusing and not clear enough.
I someone wants to proofread, he will be welcomed. Remember English is
not my mother’s language.

I think the lack of install docs come from my 3 weak points :
. There are lots of docs that teach to install a Rails app along the
web, but they are not dedicated to Typo.
. I’ve been doing sysadmin for 10 years now, so I don’t find this
diffucult at all, and c/p some configuration file is generally enough
to me.
. I’m not very good at writing English while having writen many docs
about Typo install in French.

– The mars edit bugs :
They’ve been fixed in the trunk last week. I now need to find out how
I can add tags and everything will be OK. The reason why it was
brocken was easy : I had never used desktop clients until 2 weeks ago,
when I started to close bugs.

– The caching bugs :
Almost all of them were fixed in the 5.0.4b2, the remaining ones were
fixed in trunk. I’m going to do extensive caching tests before
releasing to see if everything is OK. I really don’t like maintaining
2 caches modes, but Piers C., my co maintener, really want to do so.

BTW, I must disagree with Typo not being able to handle a large trafic
blog. Since it serves static HTML files, it’s not a problem at all.
I’ve been doing some tests on 1.000.000 pages view / day with a
comment (and so cache sweeping) every 5 minutes, and my server handled
it very well. Even a bit more than a Wordpress blog since Wordpress
cache doesn’t serve static HTML files and needs to call some PHP to
know what it need to serve.

– For Scott questions :
. Typo version is the footer of your admin page, and this information
comes from lib/typo_version.rb
. It depends on how you run it. My favourite methode is just overwrite
Typo files, restart the application and rake RAILS_ENV=production
db:migrate. If you’re running the installer, update your Typo gem, and
then typo upgrade some/path, then restart and rake. This question just
made me want to add an upgrade form where you can just upload typo-
some-version.tar.gz which will unpack itself in your RAILS root.

– For the next week :
There is a few things I want to do before releasing. If someone has a
few hours to help, this will be greatly appreciated.
. write (or proofread) install / upgrade doc
. add tags support on desktop client api
. add a nice form for our import from another blogware plugin, better
than command line.
. fix bugs
. finish to work on Typogarden with Damien, who now controls it.
. update language files for translators
. add maybe add 1-2 nice features I have in mind.

Hope this have helped
Cheers
Frédéric

–
Frédéric de Villamil
[email protected] tel: +33 (0)6 62 19 1337
http://fredericdevillamil.com Typo : http://typosphere.org

19

Chet,

Which portion of the documentation needs to be revised? FastCGI?
Mongrel? I suppose someone can whip up some instructions on how to
make the config.ru for Passenger if need be. Typo is imo extremely
easy to deploy and get up in running in under 5 minutes. If your
having a problem deploying typo please elaborate and tell us what the
problem is with you deploying Typo so we can help you deploy it? I
can read over old e-mails however that does not always constitute the
current situation. Specifics are excellent, like are you using Apache
2.0? 2.2? 1.3? How are you attempting to deploy it via FastCGI?
Mongrel?

As far as Phusion Passenger (http://www.modrails.com/) it’s actually
if you look at their site they even have tested Typo with it
(Support
).

Ideally, one would like to use Swiftiply (Mongrel with some added
performance), but that’s not here nor there.

In typo 4.1.1 (I won’t reference a recent version because I don’t have
one installed currently) there is typo/installer and inside there is
examples for apache13 apache20 (which works for 22) and lighttpd
(fastcgi). For the most part you should just have to Copy & Paste,
modify the small things and go.

But I will leave the question open here,

How can we help you deploy Typo? be as specific as possible.

20

Scott L. wrote:

not easy to find.

I’ll certainly agree with that. Getting mongrel working with
mod_proxy was essentially an exercise in Google and reading blogs.

Why is mod_proxy working with mongrel such an exercise?

That’s it as a whole, 7 whole lines. Add that to your apache
configuration in a Virtualhost area for your blog and startup typo and
you should be golden.

At which point you wonder why everything is running so slow, and you
discover that mongrel really, really sucks at delivering image files and
the like. So your 7 line example works if you want horrible performance
with even a trivial number of users.

I’ve tried Gentoo and it’s worked excellent also, so perhaps some research is
in order?

Actually, I’ve used Ruby on a number of the Linux problems, and the
interaction of Gems and Ruby is a problem on all of them. A snide and
condescendng tone does not change this fact, it merely convinces people
they don’t want to bother using typo.