WebDAV plugin for Mephisto

May 5th, 2007

I’ve put together a WebDAV plugin for mephisto the rails blogging engine which runs this site which adds 2 webdav controllers using RailsDAV.

1. Theme DAV Controller – Allows a standard file mount of the mephisto themes directory protected by a BASIC authentication requiring you to log in as an admin user. This means you can edit the life themes from your favourite editor. All general file functions such as move, copy, delete and make folder should all be good.

2. Asset DAV Controller – Allows uploading and downloading of Mephisto assets through the file system mounting. This is a great example of using RailsDAV with attachment_fu which i’ll go into greater detail about in a later post. It’s worth noting that if you upload images, the resized versions thumb and tiny are also then available for download. You can’t create new directories but you can delete assets.

For now installing the mephisto_dav plugin has the following pre-reqs:

So installation is a matter of running the following in your mephisto rails directory:


ruby script/plugin install http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/mephisto_dav

Then after starting your server you can connect your favourite WebDAV client (such as Finder on Mac OS X) to http://server/theme_dav or http://server/asset_dav

UPDATE: I realise that the comments havn’t been working on liverail and the railsdav lighthouse project was shut. Both should be working now.

4 comments »

You've got Spam!

January 16th, 2007

I’ve been hit with some serious blog spamming for a while now. Both comments and trackback.

After a period of time away from my blog I came back to realise that the bots had taken over my content. I first noticed when I was checking my Google Analytics and found people were coming to my blog to read about some acts i’d never even knew about let alone wrote about!!.

So I cleared up all the Trackbacks (too spammy), turned on Akismet in Typo and cleared down the rest of the comment spam.

Interesting dynamics to the spam content. Some was plain spam, some was just short news articles. Some was psesdo-spam saying “great article, really useful” which could have been a real comment but obviously wasn’t. Some just reposted other peoples comments.

Well Akismet has got rid of some of it but a lot is still coming through. Annoyingly Typo still seems to store the comment if Akismet says it is spam but sets Published to ‘No’. This means I still have to trawl through the Unpublished spam to find the ones to get rid of.

Anyway all this is forcing me to start working on a move to Mephisto. Has anyone else done this move? Any tips. Will Mephisto do better with my spam.

Live in hope ;-)