Website Refreshed

After a few weekends of work, the old cubicle muses and peregrinari websites have been relaunched with a new style and new backend. The previous site ran on pyblosxom, which I still really like but was difficult for Jenny to use. So I switched everything to Radiant CMS.

Some other changes include using Feedburner for feeds and new designs based using the blueprint css framework. The blogs also now aggregate data from our accounts on Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader, Flickr and similar websites. I’ve been considering using disqus for managing site comments, but until they support import of old comments I’m using the Radiant comment extension. However, judging by the traffic in only the last hour, I may need to beef up comment-spam detection.

There’s also going to be a few more 404s (missing pages) than usual until I can figure out Joyent’s httpd configuration tools. All the previous articles and comments should still be at the same urls, but some images and files have moved. (For example, a file at /cm/images/jaaron.jpg will now be at just /images/jaaron.jpg.) This is simple enough to solve if I can only get the right Apache directives to configured on Joyent’s shared accelerators. They limit some of what you can do (no mod_rewrite, for example), so for the next day or so I’ll have plenty of error messages.

I’m also curious to see how well the site performs. One of the reasons I switched away from pyblosxom was due to performance. Pyblosxom is basically just a cgi script that reads and transforms flat files into weblog pages. All that file access starts to add up when you have lots of previous articles. I was hoping that Radiant would be much speedier due to using a database and caching. However, so far the site is still a bit sluggish. Hopefully once more of the pages are cached (and we’re generating less 404s), the site will be more responsive. Otherwise, I may wish I had jumped on the wordpress bandwagon.