Peter's Blog

For the record I am still alive.

I'm busy working on a new blogging platform and I'm not quite ready to make it live yet. I decided to write it in Ruby on Rails directly rather than use an existing blogging application. I wanted something that ran under ruby on rails for the hackability and there were four candidates:

typo: Most popular rails blogging app but nobody seems to rate it as technically excellent. I tried the demo but was put off by the ajax: lots of complexity to go wrong there. mephisto: This seems to be highly regarded on a technical level but a few things put me off:

• it hasn't had an official release since 2006, the mephisto community seems to work in terms of svn revision numbers.
• it needs a pagination plugin to give basic functionality required by any blog with more than ten posts. I'd rather keep plugin requirements to a minimum (fewer things to break when upgrades come along).
• the database schema seems to be growing in complexity: 17 tables? The number of fields in the table that holds posts is also proliferating: 27 fields?
• the layout is configured by editing liquid templates. Apart from making it possible to edit layouts through the admin panel and to support themes, to me this just adds another layer of complexity and more to learn. I am happy with Rails built-in templating system. It took me no time to port my drupal theme to rails.

simplelog: a simple blogging platform but it didn't grab me. The link on the site to a wiki gives an access error.

radiant: Could be used for blogging but Radiant is primarily a cms. The author of Radiant uses Mephisto...

Development of my application has been quite rapid and it's very nearly ready for launch. However I have a problem with the Ruby on Rails testing framework: it's addictive and I can't bare the thought of putting up a live website without making sure it is thoroughly tested first. I'm in that testing/polishing phase that is hard to break out of if you have any kind of obsession with detail.

One thing is for sure: Rails is a joy to work with.

In the meantime, this old blog platform has lost it's lustre and I'm not so included to use it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention hobix. I can't get past the website...