Mat Harvard

Just pushed some updates to my website. Here's a general list:

• Re-factored design
• Posting system updated
• Comment system improvements
• Spam filtering on comments (not that I get much spam)
• Deploying now done with Capistrano
• Web server changed to Apache with mod_rails

The design took about three days on and off to complete. Majority of the work was ripping out code rather then adding. The forms took the most beating, the current forms were scrapped, in favor of a new one (actually back to the Rails default), and more simple CSS. Adding a spam filter to the comments was the next largest project. In total it took two days, but it was more involved than deleting some HTML and adding more CSS. The administration section is simply built into the interface. There is no /admin page. If one is logged in, they see the edit/destroy links, otherwise they don't. There used to be published and unpublished posts. That function didn't see much action, so I decided to take it out as well.

Before this release I was using SFTP to deploy. Now I've switched to using Capistrano. Also, in place of Nginx and Mongrel, the website now runs on Apache and mod_rails. There is no monitoring software installed yet (I plan to soon), but from my own browsing the speeds have increased quite a bit.