Finally got some time and finished setting up the new Radiant based site.
Ampelofilosofies now has it’s very own home and I will slowly migrate most of the content from the old site.
It might take a while to configure and link RSS back into the site, but for the moment I am very satisfied with the result. It actually took a lot less time than I thought to migrate the templates and css from the old site into radiant.
The ease of use of radiant is amazing. Not only where it concerns the actual managing of the content and how easy it was to replicate the functionality of my own statically generated site, but also in how easy it was to deploy the whole thing.
Since radiant is a Rails app I turned to capistrano. I’ve been using capistrano for a while now, but for a completely different scenario. Up until now I had to write quite a few tasks but I never deployed a Rails application (it doesn’t help that sinatra fits my requirements better).
To top that up, ampelofilosofies is hosted on textdrive. Kudos to Textdrive/Joyent for their excellent documentation on how do get things properly wired.
Configuring capistrano while sticking to the conventions was (what a surprise!) child’s play although it did require a bit of googling since as usual my case deviates from the scenario used in the tutorials.
ampelofilosofies is developed in my local git repository, that means I have to use the following lines in my config/deploy.rb
set :repository, "file://."
set :deploy_via, :copy
set :scm, :gitThe username on my dev machine does not match the username for the textdrive account so
set :user, "your_username"
set :use_sudo, falsesetting :use_sudo to false since we are in a shared host.
set :deploy_to should be an absolute path otherwise the current link created by capistrano will not work.
On the textdrive side I only had to link the public directory with the current/public directory to conform to the directory structure imposed by capistrano. In the “documentation for deploying Rails applications”:http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:installing-rails avoid the section on config/environment.rb. There is a note saying that it won’t work with Radiant >0.6.5 and I can confirm that 0.8.1 works without this.
Of-course being lazy I had to setup password-less login for ssh, but that was a breeze anyway.
So it took all of 6 hours (or 3 months…if you measure time like everyone else) to get this site up and running again.