new blog powered by toto

A little History

Back in the old days I started blogging with Geeklog, this evolved to Xoops an later on to a basic Wordpress.

When I started with Rails, first I wanted to build my own system, customize it to my needs. But after the first edition of ArrrrCamp the guys of Gorilla Webdesign could convince me to try Radiant. ~ I liked the system, but as I wanted to post more media, the flow was to slow. For this I started using ‘tumblr’ where I can dump the media I collect on the internet.

Still, my radiant blog, which I use mainly for technological stuff was to slow, I needed something smaller, easier and I wanted to be able to write posts without login in, saving the post when it wasn’t ready, continue typing offline on the train. Which isn’t possible with Radiant or any other online system.

Toto

Then I bumped into Toto a git powered, minimalistic blog engine, entirely build on Rack. You just

If you have an account on Heroku, it really just takes 10 seconds to have it online.

Customizing

After I played with it for a while, adding some extra functionalities to it like rack-google-analytics and rack-rewrite to have my old posts still working. All just added to the config.ru file. I really like the lightness of Rack and this blog. It maybe has 300 lines of code and is superfast.

Deploying

After that I just had to add a very simple capfile and deploy it on the account where used to run my Radiant blog. You could just use a default passenger capfile but skip all the database and assets stuff.

Just give it a try yourself!