Alex Pooley's Blog

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I’ve upgraded this blog from typo stable to typo edge so the source is coming straight out of subversion. It wasn’t as straight forward as I was hoping. Here’s how you can upgrade your stable typo installation to stay on the edge, using dreamhost hosting, and feedburner syndication:

* Backup your old typo blog, including the database.
* No really, backup your blog and db, you may need it later!
* Modify your current blog to point to the ‘azure’ theme otherwise you’ll get an error when starting your new blog.
* Layout your directory structure so that you have something like this for good practice:

/yourdomain.com
/your_backed_up_blog
/current -> /your_backed_up_blog

* Change your hosting settings in Dreamhost so that the doc root is /yourdomain.com/current/public. Your blog should still work once the Dreamhost server updates it’s settings.
* From /yourdomain.com run svn checkout svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk typo
* Modify the database.yml file to your settings.
* Replace your dispatch.fcgi with:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + “/../config/environment”
require ‘fcgi_handler’

#RailsFCGIHandler.process!

class MyRailsFCGIHandler < RailsFCGIHandler
SIGNALS = {
'TERM' => :exit_now,
}

def exit_now_handler(signal)
dispatcher_log :info, “ignoring request to terminate immediately”
end
end

MyRailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 25

* Jump in to /yourdomain.com/current and type rake migrate to update your database. Remember to backup your old database first!
* If you’re running with feedburner then to enable autodiscovery of your feedburner feed and not typo’s default feed replace the <%= page_header %> line in typo/themes/azure/layouts/default.rhtml to the following:

<%= javascript_include_tag 'cookies' %>
<%= javascript_include_tag 'prototype' %>
<%= javascript_include_tag 'effects' %>
<%= javascript_include_tag 'typo' %>

* Now modify the feedburner line you just added with your own feedburner feed:
* Note that the previous feedburner mod may get written over when you update your svn export.
* Finally redirect the ‘current’ symlink so that it points to /yourdomain.com/typo. Your dir layout should look like this:

/yourdomain.com
/your_backed_up_blog
/typo
/current -> /typo

You should be done now. If things aren’t working then check your logs for hints. If I’ve left anything out please add comments and I’ll update this post as required.