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Today I switched this blog from the old, dynamic Mephisto engine to the static nanoc framework.

Plans are to write a little more again, I’ll also describe what I used for this blog in detail.

I was really glad to finally read the news that Passenger 2.2.0 now supports my favorite webserver nginx too.

I always wanted to get rid of the somehow apache monster, which is an overkill in some scenarios (imho).

Nginx has a very easy configuration and everything I need.

If you want to test passenger with nginx it’s as simple as:

            
            sudo gem install passenger
            sudo passenger-install-nginx-module
            
            # edit the default config:
            sudo vi /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
            
            # start nginx
            sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
            
            

There is also a Peepcode Screencast explaining the steps.

I’m happy :)

I always found the default mailbox handling of mutt a little complicated, since it was missing an overview of folders on the main screen.

Mutt-Ng solved this by introducing a sidebar to list all your mailboxes, including a new/old mail count. However this didn’t last very long and the mutt-ng development stopped unfortunately.

I didn’t look at the possibilities regarding this issue for quite a while, since I had a mailbox status list included in my Windowmanager, however, I tried to integrate it into mutt again last week.

Fortunately the sidebar has been extracted and is now available as a patch: Mutt sidebar (folder list) patch

And for all the lazy people, there is also a debian package called mutt-patched which includes the sidebar among other useul additions.

Now I’m using the following, very nice, setup:

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Google seems to know something about the new Ruby 1.9.1 release regarding Ruby on Rails:

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The question is, does Google suggest “fails” as a correction for “rails” because the word is similar – or because the combination is typed in a lot? :)

I created multiple sites during the last few weeks, and wondered what’s the best website statistics solution to use with them.

My requirements are:

• API/XML Export (I’m collecting the statistics in a central application)
• Realtime (almost)
• all the metrics I usually need (popular pages, referrer sites, entry pages, etc)

As mentioned here before, I used Clicky for a while, and I have to say it’s one of the best systems I know.
Unfortunately the free edition is quite limited (regarding my needs): No API, Limited Sites and Tracking.
However, I still use it on this and another site.

I then came across GoingUP which is quite nice too and has a free API.
But again it was limited to a maximum number of visitors/sites. So I had to move on ..

I’m now using Piwik which is by far the best website statistics system I know.

It aims to be an open source version of Google Analytics:

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Piwik is PHP and MySQL based, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you have a usual webserver somewhere.

You can then track multiple (remote) sites by including a short snippet.
Piwik also has a very nice API featuring different output formats like XML, JSon, HTML etc and even a very nice Plugin System (if you like to develop in PHP) :)

Give it a try, it has a nice installation Routine and is up in a minute.

If you did not already read it, there are really cool christmas news on the Ruby on Rails Blog

The Merb Framework – the highly modified framework initially based on/inspired by the rails core and made to improve speed, concurrency and a small footprint – will be merged into “Rails 3.0”.

Let’s look at the Merb feature list to see what this means:

Merb is..

• ORM-agnostic (through plugins)
• JavaScript library agnostic (through plugins)
• template language agnostic (through plugins)
• thread safe (+ multiple file uploads)
• simple and optimized core without sacrificing functionality
• improvements

what I especially like is the modularity of Merb, compared to Rails

This is a rough overview of what Rails 3.0 will look like, having the Merb features:

• Optionally a minimum and full featured core
• A lot of performance improvements
• Framework agnosticism (JS, ORM, template and testing level)
• A better, more stable API (eg. for plugins)

When will we get Rails 3.0?

I guess this is very hard to predict :) but the goal is to have at least a Beta version ready for RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas

I totally concur with the post on the ROR Weblog, Rails 3.0 will kick ass!