I’ve been working on migrating this old blog to Mephisto blogging system. Mephisto runs on Rails which I have blogged about before and still continue to love and swear by.

The old blog I wrote in PHP a few years ago. I was just getting sick of re-inventing the wheel every time I wanted to add and maintain a new feature. I wanted a new system that I didn’t have to build and maintain so that I could focus more on the actual content. Mephisto also allows you to use Akismet for spam defense. Akismet is typically used with WordPress and does a great job of keeping comment spam out of your blog. I was spending way too much time removing spam from the old blog, so Akismet is a welcome change!

Also, for the sake of time, I decided to download a theme for Mephisto rather than design one myself. I chose the Lucid theme which is actually a port of the Lucid Typo theme (Typo is another Rails based blogging system). I have tweaked the default theme quite a bit to be better suited for SEO as well as handle my google ads. I also changed the default color from Ruby to Mint. But if you like the Ruby better you can change it in the upper right corner. You can also change the layout from static to liquid. These options are a few of the reasons I chose the Lucid theme.

Last but not least, I’ve finally made the transition from using Webalizer as my tracking software, to using Google Analytics instead. Google Analytics is a robust tracking application that is comparable to expensive tracking apps like Omniture but is offered as a free service. I’m extremely impressed with Google Analytics’ capabilities and how easy it is to implement. I’d recommend it for any website, big or small!

Let me know what you think of the new do.