Writing your own blog tools is fun until you get the rug pulled out from under you by your hosting service when you don't have any spare time to fix things.

Finally, I think everything is working again. Now if I only had something to say.

Sorry about that folks. My hosting service updated the Rails version on the shared server and this update removed a bunch of deprecated methods my blog application relied on. My Rails skillz were rusty and it took me some time to fix but it's back up now. This sucks on multiple levels but I guess it's par for the course.

I noticed Thursday that my blog was no longer working. I hadn't changed anything so I figured it was just a hosting glitch and would resolve itself. On Friday when I checked again, it was still down so I decided to contact my hosting service and find out what was up. Hosting support informed me they no longer supported the SCGI rails accelerator my blog was using and I would need to switch over to a Mongrel based solution. To complicate matters, in order to run under Mongrel, my application had to be modified and would need to be hosted under a subdomain of developingstorm.com. I think everything is sorted out now but needless to say this has been a pain in the ass and I'm not happy with how I found out about this required change.

For a while now any reader who left a comment was shown a rather ugly error message. I've known about it for a while but never had time or energy to dive in and figure out what was going on. The problem stemmed from my use of a property in the ActionMailer::Base class that was deprecated and renamed: .server_settings was renamed to .smtp_settings. At some point my service provider must have upgraded the server's version of rails and caused Dog to be get out of date. I've updated Dog's source to comply with the new calling convention. The short of it is you should no longer get an error when leaving a comment.

Everyone has been too polite to point this out but the blogs been rather slow since I switched to my Rails based solution. This is through not fault of Ruby or Rails however, I just wanted to keep things simple and I've been running under a CGI setup. My hosting service offers SCGI however and I've finally had them set me up. If you don't care, you don't need to do anything, the existing URLs will continue to work albeit at the current speed. If you want to see how the blog works when the entire application and the db connections aren't being ripped down and rebuilt continuously, you can use the URL: http://www.developingstorm.com/dog/blog/ instead of http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/

I've added a simple comment security system to try and stop some of the comment spam I've been seeing. My approach is based on other simple systems I've seen around the web. Unlike the popular image based approach, this system works by making users answer a simple question like 'what is 7 plus 21?' or 'what color is an orange?'. It's certainly not fool proof but hopefully it will keep some of the crap out. Silly question suggestions are welcome.

This is my first offical post created with my new blogging tool I've been calling Dog. It's still a bit rough, so I will be dual posting on Dog and Blogger for a while until I work out the kinks. If you want to switch your RSS feed to the new system, subscribe to http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/rss. You can find the new blog's html output at http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog