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I finally managed to import the articles from my old wordpress 1.5 to this Typo blog, but it was a pain in the ass. There are several ways how this is supposed to be done that come with Typo, but none of them worked for me. The "official" way is to use "vendor/plugins/typo_converter", but the Wordpress converter works only for Wordpress 2.5, so I did not even try it in my WP 1.5. I accept that, but when I would have upgraded to the current wordpress version, I would not have bothered to move to Typo any more.

But there are two other scripts in "db/converters" that looked quite usable for me, "feed.rb" and "rss.rb", that were supposed to extract content from a feed. Both did not work, and I was not able to make them work. "rss.rb" retrieved the feed but could not insert anything into the database, it threw a conversion exception. I was willing to track the problem down, but running the script with "ruby -v" quickly turned me away: Hundreds of lines of warnings, error messages and exceptions made it impossible to figure out what was really going wrong - and I assume that most of these error messages indicated just normal operation. This sucks and really turns me away from wanting to help or contribute here.

"feed.rb" did completely refuse to cooperate. It kept telling me I should install the "feedtools" gem, which already was installed. No amount of gem massaging could convince the script to run. I assume it is also some version problem, because feedtools (0.2.29) wants activesupport (2.1.1), but Typo insist to use rails 2.0.2 stuff only, and I could not find older feedtools. Although this is just a guess, it was definitely not a convincing user experience.

At this point I started again to look around for another blog software, but everything ruby-based I encountered was just not ready for real use or seemed already abandoned. I also looked at MovableType, which makes a quite solid impression, but after having spent already about two days on all this administration stuff, I would have liked to come to point of actually using the blog to publish something, but I did not want to leave my old content behind.

And then, this saved my day. A ruby script that uses XML-RPC to migrate between blogs. This is cool, not only because it works, but because it should work for any blog that uses the MovableType API, and WordPress is among them. No version hassle, no database dumps. There are however some drawbacks: You loose your comments, and you have to create you categories manually on the destination system, but the posting dates and the formats were quite intact. I will also have to migrate the images and files by hand, but this is probably the case with all other converters.

Another minor glitch I encountered was that not all posts did show up in Typo at first, so I tried again, only to discover after the second try that everything was there now twice. It turned out that the first try had already succeeded, but some posts just take longer to appear. I shall also note that unpublished drafts will also be transferred and appear as published articles, so take care!

For now I will continue to run my blog with Typo, although I am not convinced yet that this will turn out to be a good idea. Compared to WordPress, it has some rough edges, and the usabilty could be better. The use of AJAX does not guarantee a great user experience, but what I have seen so far is also not too bad, but has a lot of headroom for improvement.

I am not convinced yet, neither by Ruby nor by Typo, but potential for a great user experience is there. Installation, configuration and customizing is much easier than with WordPress, if there were not this version mess on all levels of the system and a better, more complete and up-to-date documentation.

After my old server’s power supply exploded I decided to consolidate services on another machine that is running anyway, For this new server I chose Debian, after trying all major Linux distributions, FreeBSD and even Solaris, Debian turned out to be the best match for my aging but solid machine, a ServerWorks Dual Pentium 3 1 Ghz Board with 2 MB ECC RAM and two RocketRaid 1820 8 channel SATA controllers. My previous server was Gentoo-based, which I quite liked, but keeping it up-to-date required more time I was willing to spend. Debian at first seemed to be a good choice, but compared to Gentoo, it looks like a big mess to me, and the documentation and howtos are much worse than I expected. Many important things are either undocumented, hard to track down, or the documentation is outdated. I can not say I really love Debian, but it gets the job done.

Next question was, what blog software? My old blog used Wordpress, but I was very unhappy about all the security issues popping up, and fighting blogspam was extremely annoying. And I do not trust php, although it is simple and well documented, and some serious sites use it with good success, e.g. Wikipedia or Yahoo. But you could say the same thing about Visual Basic and it does not make it cool.

As Ruby-on-Rails seems to be beyond the first hype now and should have matured into something useable and stable, it looked like a good candidate. And there is the nice demo about how to write your own blog with ruby in fifteen minutes, so by now there should be some serious rails-based blog software out there.

As you can see, I have chosen Typo for now. The Ruby-on-Rails installation on Debian turned out to be a much bigger mess than expected. I ran into at least ten problems, which I was finally able to solve, but it required installation of several additional undocumented packets, installing three different Ruby versions, consulting two experts and some dozen of websites to get through all that.

Here some hints if you want to run Typo and Ruby-on-Rails on Debian:

- Don’t even try to use the Ruby-Version that comes with etch

- The ruby 1.8.7-72 version that comes currently with backports won’t work with Typo

- The "official" 1.8.6 works but has security issues

- I finally had to go with Phusion’s Ruby Enterprise Edition (uh, what a name)

However, the Phusion guys also provide mod_passenger for apache, which was very easy and straightforward to set up, and makes quite sense to me from a technical point of view. The other mature alternative is using apache as a proxy for mongrail, but in this case you won’t make use of apaches’ capabilities to manage processes.

Anyway, I am curios how all this will work out, but it is always an interesting reality check when you try the stuff yourself. My general impression about how the Open Source Cosm evolves is that things are getting mostly worse, not better. There is more fragmentation than consolidation, and way too much time is spent on "new" stuff, and too little time on consolidating, bugfixing and documentation. I don’t want to put blame on anyone here, I think the Open Source Movement is a very valueable one, and many people out there spend a lot of time improving and maintaining things, but the Open Source user experience really sucks too often. And the alternatives are also not exactly great. The Microsoft user experience to me is also almost unbearable, and Apple’s OSX is only bearable because of the access to large parts of the Open Source universe.

So, this is enough for my first new post, I will try to salvage my old blog somehow, either by importing it or providing a static version. The first impressions of Typo is good, but I barely scratched the surface. I will keep you informed.