The Mechanical Turk

After a long gestation period, we’re now unveiling the new look—and engine—for the Mechanical Turk.

The look

The basis for the new look is of course our corporate site with a few tweaks. The masthead is based upon the back of our business cards—we are very fond of our bonsai logo.

We also took the opportunity to widen the display from our corporate look—there’s a lot of evidence that shows 1,024 x 768 pixels is now the most common resolution. In due time our corporate site will also reflect this wider presentation—which might be good, because we know the site is a bit text-heavy. Perhaps the change will make this appear less of a problem!

The engine

Previously, we had used the Typo engine for our blog. It’s lightweight & has some nice features, but despite using the most recent release, we found it to be very unstable. For instance, if I discovered, after posting, that I had made a typo (ha ha) & I corrected it, Typo’s lighty processes would eat up all the resources on the server, grinding everything to a halt. After restarting lighty processes four times in a day, we just decided that enough was enough & that we needed to switch.

But to what? If you want to run a blog on Ruby on Rails, it appears that there are three contenders: the aforementioned Typo, SimpleLog & Mephisto. While SimpleLog looks really nice, it appears that it does not have a big developer community. Mephisto does, even though there are a few worries about its future development. Apparently there is now a core team for Mephisto, so perhaps it’s got a new lease on life. Time will tell. In the meantime, Ian has tinkered under Mephisto’s hood & when he has a moment (ha ha, aren’t we funny?), perhaps he’ll write a bit about what he’s done. We are considering releasing some Mephisto plugins as well—again, in time.

The name?

As noted in the comments to my second post on the blog, we are considering a new name. We’re coming around to a name revolving around “falling leaves”—suggested by the image of the bonsai on the masthead. It’s also somewhat evocative of the nature of blog posts—posts fall when they’re ready and… OK, I’ll shut up already.

Finally, I’d like to publicly thank Ian for taking time out of his horrendously busy schedule to help get the new blog engine running so smoothly.