Robby on Rails

A few weeks ago, I started using FeedBurner and posted a blog entry about how I configured Lighttpd to handle that so it didn’t disrupt everyone that subscribes to my RSS feed. This was working great… until the other day.. when I upgraded to Typo trunk. When I did this, I decided to start using mongrel::cluster and pound. Two days later… I’m noticing that my subscriber count has dropped over thousand people in a day… was it something that I said?

A ha! I was handling the redirect with Lighttpd and had replaced it with Pound.

So, I am now delegating this to Apache.

  # Redirect typo feeds to FeedBurner
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*$
  RewriteRule /xml/(atom|rss|rss20)/feed.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails [R=temp,L]

...and all was well again.

UPDATE

The rewrite condition should be !^FeedBurner.*$ not !^FeedBurner$.

I upgraded my blog to Typo trunk this evening. I hadn’t updated since late last year… so it was long overdue. I only had one issue with a migration from a while back.

old revision: 761

current revision: 1258.

I’m impressed that the upgrade worked so nicely… last year the migrations were a bit rough. :-)

UPDATE

I’m also now running this on mongrel with pound! I followed the configuration here.

I haven’t been using feedburner to track counts of subscribers to my feed. I didn’t want to tell everyone to switch their feed URL… so I found this solution for handling this transition through Lighttpd.

First, make sure you are requiring the mod_redirect module.

server.modules              = ( "mod_rewrite", "mod_fastcgi", "mod_compress", "mod_redirect" )

Then add the following… to your lighty configuration.

$HTTP["useragent"] !~ "FeedBurner" {
  url.redirect = (
    "/xml/rss/feed.xml" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails",  
    "/xml/rss20/feed.xml" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails",
    "/xml/atom/feed.xml" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobbyOnRails" 
  )
}

Works like a charm!

Thanks to Damien Tanner for putting me on the right path.

Finally! The Typo team and PLANET ARGON have finished the first phase of the move the Typo project to a new hosting provider. Currently, subversion and the trac have been moved over.

Take a look!

On the PLANET ARGON side… David Gibbons is responsible for making this happen.

If you see any issues, let us know in #typo on irc.freenode.net or in #planetargon.

On a side note… I’m sick and going to go get some rest now.

We’re excited to announce that as of last week, the Typo development team and PLANET ARGON made an arrangement to relocate the current hosting of the Typo project to PLANET ARGON. This includes moving Subversion, Trac, downloads, mailing list(s), IRC bot, etc. There is also rumor that some energy will be going into creating a new home page for the project.

David Gibbons is currently working on migrating everything over for them and we are managing this process through our BaseCamp with the Typo team. He’ll be posting an update on his blog when this process is finished.

We’re honored that they chose PLANET ARGON to the official hosting sponsor of the Typo project. We were the first hosting provider to offer Typo hosting to customers back in April.

We look forward to helping Typo prepare for 2006…

—

Random update…

I thought it would be amusing to see just how I fit into the history of Typo. Aside from PLANET ARGON being the first host to offer Typo hosting… I was one of the first few people to run Typo as a blog… or at least I tried… see ticket #8

I was also the first person to ever run Typo on PostgreSQL (ticket #9). ... like that would surprise anyone. ;-)

—

During this period of moving from Tobias to PLANET ARGON, we are collecting email information for people so that when we help launch the new site for the project… you’ll all be notified.

TypoSphere.org (coming soon)

Geoffrey Grosenbach has announced the Typo Theme Contest on TypoGarden.org, Yay!

PLANET ARGON has offered a year of Level 3 hosting for the winner. We also promised ten free blog hosting packages to the first ten people that submit new themes that meet the requirements of the content!

Good luck to all the players. :-)

(obviously… I could use a new theme too… I might have to participate!)