AlternateIdea: The Official Mephisto Blog Launches!

August 7th, 2006

The Official Mephisto Blog Launches!

7 comments on 247 words

If your a blogger, you should definitely check this out. Mephisto is a brand spanking new blogging application that is sure to get your attention. We have worked meticulously on making it the most intuitive blogging and publishing system you can find.

Images Mephisto-Overview

Yep, this one requires that exclamation point in the title. We’ve got an official blog setup for Mephisto.

Rick Olson and I have been working at a feverish pace preparing Mephisto for our 0.5 release dubbed ”Thanos”. If your not familiar with Mephisto, it’s a publishing system built on Rails (it actually powers the official Ruby on Rails weblog) that combines the best of both worlds: blogging and static content. But it’s not yet another CMS and I encourage you to check it out and see for yourself.

I would post a big writeup on it here, but I’ve already posted an official announcement post that has all the juicy details.

Check it out!

mephistolaunch

Discussion

Stephen Rainey said on August 8th

I’m glad you guys finally got a site up. I’ve been telling people about Mephisto and I’m glad I have a place to send them now.
sly said on August 11th

Awesome, I will be switching to mephisto today. I got to many errors after upgrading to typo 4.0.2 :\.
Igwe said on August 11th

Well Mephisto is really cool. Could you add two things? I’d really like AJAX search, not live search but a bit like the search in simplelog. You simply type your search and press the ENTER key and the result are displayed without reloading the page.

Also, adding comments could use AJAX as well, or at least the option to do so. That would be great. Thanks, I really admire your work with event selectors.
Justin Palmer said on August 11th

Thanks Igwe. If you can explain the benefits of Ajax based comments and/or live search. Ajax comments, have no real benefit. It’s not a high-input, low-volume task and a page reload takes about the same or less time to execute.

There are slight benefits for live search, but I honestly don’t see enough benefit in it, especially the ‘pressing enter’ bits. The benefit of live search was that it was ‘live’ and searched as you were typing. You remove all the supposed benefits by having to press the enter button for the search to begin.

Unfortunately, we’ve come to the point where Ajax anything is assumed to be better than the standard way, but, my ears are open if there are any real benefits.
Daniel said on August 11th

Woot! Grats on the launch!
junkie said on August 11th

it looks delicious. i need a new hosting supported ruby. thanx for this system.
Aníbal Rojas said on August 18th

Off Topic: This is just a quick note to invite you to register Encytemedia and Mephisto Blog at RubyCorner.com, a meeting place for people interested in the Ruby Programming Language or any of the related technologies.

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Justin develops iPhone and Mac software over at Labrat Revenge by night and by day he is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.

Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.

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Protip: Color grep searches in terminal
```
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'
```
Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
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DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary


var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.

Feb08

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A strftime for Prototype


Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

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Processing in Action
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—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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