Ninjas on a Penny Farthing

Just a quick eoraptor / this blog pimping tonight. One of the features I've been planning to implement for a long time - projects - has now been implemented. It's basically a really easy way to have a structured project page with integrated logos etc. Nothing big but nice to have none the less. Plus, it puts me one step closer to open sourcing the site.

And in other news, I upgraded the blog to Thin tonight. The extra speed and power was a nice incentive to switch as was the whole 'coolness factor'. Next up is rewriting the stats server. So +1 Kudos for thin!.

So I made it big mistake tonight. It wasn't on purpose - far from it in fact. I was editing the deploy.rb I use to put it on this blog (thank god for Capistrano) to upload some small admin-side fixes. I decided to also make a small change that would make the symbolic linking process for image directories work. Except, I got the wrong directory. I accidentally typed in the shortcut / variable for the actual (non linked) directory to the rm part of the routine. And so, now they're gone. You'll have to just ignore the lack of images for the moment till sometime after the twelfth when I can restore them.

Since its first inception a few months ago as a merb blogging platform (I'm now running on Rails 2.0), I've always had the aim of releasing Eoraptor (the software that powers this blog) under an open source license. The platform still has its kinks (as you are no doubt aware) but I'm planning on releasing it as open source once I've finished a couple of items off. Primarily,

1. Spec's for the entire site - I've been pretty lazy so far in this regard
2. Twitter / Tumblr / Pownce like integration - I'd ideally like a flow-of-thoughts style front page
3. Finish off the projects section - it's currently part done but disabled on this blog.
4. A settings page - to make it easier to administrate

I guess once all of them have been covered, I'll finally release it. For the moment, consider this more as a road map.

I only realised earlier tonight that I'd made a big boo-boo with the blog - commenting required you to be logged in, something which was restricted to Admin users. So, I've since fixed that (as well as a few bugs you likely wouldn't have seen before) and all seems to be working well know.

So, after the past version of the blog (which looked much the same), I decided to take the time to entirely rewrite the platform from scratch using Rails 2.0. And here it is, Eoraptor Generation 2

So, what is Eoraptor?

In essence, It's a tiny blog platform I wrote with Rails to get a feeling for 2.0. Everything is self contained and the UI is built with the idea that integration is everything - the admin UI is a part of the blog interface and it's really all about publishing it and it's done. Nothing more, nothing less.

Anyway, thats enough for the moment - check back soon for both some old comment, some new comment and a few of the trick's I've implement.