Palegoldenrod

Welcome to the new Palegoldenrod!

Its a different looking site on a different host with different technologies. Here is some info about the site – which technologies it uses, where it is hosted, why I made these changes etc.

Technology

Palegoldenrod is running on Ruby on Rails, driven by MySQL.

Blog Engine – Mephisto

Mephisto is a open source blog engine project written in Ruby on Rails. Even though it is fairly young, it is very stable and gets straight into the heart of it – this has contributed to its popularity. Head over to the Mephisto site if you’d like to help contribute to this cool project.

Site Design – Zenlike by NodeThirtyThree Design

Site design, via OSWD, from Node Thirty Three Design. Some modifications had to be made to better suit both my use of the site and also Mephisto, but hopefully I have remained true to the original design.

When I get a bit more organised (stop laughing) I’ll try and release the theme for Mephisto.

Hosting

This site is proudly hosted by Dreamhost. I highly recommend Dreamhost for non-Windows hosting – I can’t say enough good things about them. Click the graphic below if you’d like to help cover my hosting costs.

What was wrong with the old site?

Well, a few things. Firstly I was bored with the old theme. Secondy the site was in .NET. While this was handy for modifications (I work with .NET often), the host was cheap and nasty and I had repeated service problems with them. I have also wanted to learn more RoR for ages now, and I see this as my opportunity.

The old site was run by SubText, an Open Source .NET blogging engine – it was great. It did the job well. SubText in no way contributed to my change of heart.

The other problem is the cost of Windows hosting. I can have unlimited domains, databases etc on Dreamhost for about $10 a month for reliable service and some cool features. I think the closest I can get to that in Windows is a VPS which has little memory (no good for our memory hungry .NET, d’oh) and for (at the moment) around $20 a month minimum. Hmmm.. not great for someone who just wants to tinker.

And for those of you who are suggesting that I host it on my own machine at home, thats not really feasible when I want to queue up some torrents / reboot my machine / play games on it etc

I’d like to try Mono, but I don’t think we can install it on Dreamhost as the mod_mono package requires a constantly running process which violates DH terms of use. Maybe they will set it up for us soon – that would be awethome. In the meantime, if you know of any .NET hosts that allow several .NET sites, several databases (even if its just SQL2005 Express) at a reasonable price, leave your comment below