ColdFusion 9, Mango Blog, and git

I made a few major changes to my site in one fell swoop.

• Changed to a VPS
• Upgraded to ColdFusion 9
• Changed blog to Mango Blog
• Changed version control to git

A few people asked me questions about the changes so I figured I would explain.

Why a VPS?

I really like my hosting company, YoHost, but it was still shared hosting. That meant I couldn’t experiment with administrative settings and whatnot. Also I was constrained to my hosting provider’s upgrade schedule. Changing to a VPS meant that I can do whatever I want whenever I want. I like that freedom.

Why ColdFusion 9?

You mean other than that I am an evangelist for it? Well I actually used a few pieces of it. I built an admin piece for my events page using ORM and ColdFusion Builder’s code generation. I also added a page that pulls in my presentations from SlideSix. To not tax their servers too much, I used the new caching features of ColdFusion. So I’m not just using ColdFusion 9 to use it, I’m leveraging some of the features.

Why Mango Blog?

First off let me just say, I love Ray Camden. I’d go so far as to say I have a non-sexual man-crush on him. That being said, I went to Mango Blog. I’ve been using it in our internal blog that Ben talked about a while back. There are a few things that I completely love. I love the rich text editor. I love the plugin architecture. I love the caching. I love the skinning. It’s fantastic. Those were my big motivators. I felt that even with the changes I made to the default Mango Blog install I could easily keep it up to date, whereas I felt extreme apprehension about updating BlogCFC because of all of the changes I made to code to make it work the way I wanted. To be clear, I had to tweak both, it’s just that my Mango tweaks were mostly in a skin, which won’t get changed by future updates.

Why git?

Because I want to be one of the cool kids who’s all like “Subversion, oh yeah I did that like 8 years ago, I feel so bad for you for using a mature technology that you can rely on.”

Okay maybe not. The big motivator for me for git was online/offline changes. I often work without a good network connection. Being able to work properly, with multiple check ins even without connectivity was killer. I also appreciate the fact that the metadata is in one place. This makes copying the project during a build feasible instead of a network intensive svn export. This reduced my build process for my site from 3 or so minutes to 30 seconds. This means I’m more likely to update more often.

So there you go. This was a very practical upgrade for me, I got a lot out of it, and I have a few reports that the site is even faster then it was before. So except for a little blog barfing on the aggregators it seemingly went well.