Just a quick status report: I’ve been struggling mightily with Ruby on Rails, the web application framework du jour, and I finally managed to get a working copy of Mephisto, yet another blog engine. While Typo was OK, I unfortunately discovered that AJAXy-goodness wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be when I couldn’t easily customize my blog. While the idea of drag-and-drop widgets is cool, it’s also slow as hell, and I just didn’t have the patience to wait for the refreshes, particularly when in some cases, I could just write the requisite HTML in the same time.

I’ll go into the various hacks I had to do apply in order to get it up and running. Most of the pain was caused by my burning desire to get the trunk version of Mephisto working. If you actually follow the instructions to install Mephisto 0.7.3 (stable), it’s actually quite painless (and it installs pretty much the same way Typo does.)

What I did learn is that Ruby and Rails are awesome. No more wading through Google search results to find the commands that I want and how to call them. No more riffling through source code with obscure file names to try and untangle logic. If I had become a programmer, I would’ve definitely gone with OO right from the start. For some reason, I can look at Ruby code and grasp it way faster than I could ever figure out Perl or PHP.

The other neat thing about Mephisto is that its relatively new. Sure, on the downside, that means that lots of standard blogging features are not yet well implemented. On the upside, this gives me more freedom to hack on it and learn Ruby and RoR by writing my own kludges. It’s kind of in the state that Blosxom was in when I jumped on that particular bandwagon: core features are essentially complete. But I bet you’ll be wanting the bells-and-whistles, which will require either patience for the developers to get to it, or mastery of Ruby and RoR to write your own code.

But enough of that. It’s time to get back on the road.