andrew.pilsch.com

I’m currently writing the theme for this blog. It’s going well enough (although my dad’s old-ass Windows 2K box rendered it weirdly). The thing that I’m a little nervous about is running this guy on Mephisto. It seems like the software package towards which the rails communtiy is gravitating. Also, it satisfies most of my blogging requirements (I’d like one that I didn’t have to actually use an administrative interface for (although, Mephisto does have a nice admin system)).

Anyway, it’s nice to finally be able to use a blog package that appears to release software regularly (and doesn’t suck) . Typo, which apparently fragged its webserver, used to be the go-to for blogging using Ruby On Rails, but with the release of Mephisto, that seems to be changing. Case in point: the rails people even moved their (excellent) blog to Mephisto. It’s nice, especially that Typo hasn’t released a non-beta in a very long time and dealing with checking revisions out of an SVN repository is not fun for users.

The thing I’m worried about, though, is that the software is missing features at the moment. For instance, the archive support is a little … strange. Things like that (that would appear to require a reworking of the templating system) seem to me to suggest larger problems down the line. I don’t know.

While Ruby On Rails is currently the future of web development, I think it’s a little risky being this sexy and provocative in my blogging software choice. That said, though, I can’t figure out why I would want to use anything else.

One of my major requirements in choosing a blog software is not having to mess with MySQL (partly because Dreamhost’s database hosting is a nightmare to work with and partly because I don’t want to have to deal with a MySQL install on my OSX box at home). Another is the ability to use Textile as a mark-up language for posting blog entries, so that I don’t have to deal with HTML. WordPress does both of those things, but I have to fight with it to install a SQLite plugin and to install a Textile plugin. Similarly, Textpattern does Textile formatting, but is hardcoded to mysql (and in a way that isn’t pretty (I tried rewriting it for PEAR DB, but that was ugly)). So it would seem that a Ruby On Rails solution is the only possibility (thanks to the ease of switching between databases in Rails and the wonderous RedCloth library). In many ways, this fact enables me to win. Smart / talented people are making software in Ruby On Rails and using software written in a “hot” web language has added indie-cache for me (“I was into Ruby on Rails back when it was underground” … or something).

With Mephisto in such an unstable state, I’m a little worried at this point, but don’t see what else I can do. I don’t like that I have to use Edge Rails. I don’t like that the feature set may change at a moments notice. That said, formatting in Textile and not fighting with MySQL is so awesome.

EDIT: I’m noticing that Mephisto is really easy to use. One of the problems I had with Typo (the other Ruby on Rails blog engine that meets my two criteria) is that it is slow as Hell (the live-preview feature was a really, really bad idea). Mephisto feels as though it isn’t getting in my way. I appreciate that in a computer program.