I’ve succeeded in moving the blog over to Rails Machine. So far, it seems to be working great, with much faster page loads. I was seeing very erratic performance at Rails Playground, and it was down for more than 8 hours two nights ago. (Of course, it is one tenth the price of Rails Machine, so I wouldn’t expect the same level of performance.)

I’ve also upgraded to Mephisto 0.7.3.

This was my first experience deploying with Capistrano, and it took me a while to get everything right. All the automation Capistrano provides, especially with the railsmachine gem, is great—but for someone relatively new to the Rails world, it also adds another layer of stuff to figure out, and it obscures some of the details of what’s going on (which is a good thing when it all works, and not such a good thing when something goes wrong).