When you get down to it, Mephisto has all the things I want in a blog engine. Non-crufty permalinks. (Only Wordpress formats its permalinks similarly, although you can easily get this from Blosxom.) A clean interface (Simplelog is probably the only one that is as clean.) A templating system that doesn’t utilize nested angle-brackets (something that every single templating system out there has a problem with, except for Liquid, XSLT, and Erubis.) A templating system that strives to separate business logic from presentation (this is something I hate about PHP, and it’s the thing that drove me away from Wordpress and which keeps me away, despite the fact that it has been the easiest blog engine to deal with so far. This is the thing that I love about XSLT despite its obtuse, arcane syntax. This is what I fear about Erb, because it makes it so easy to insert Ruby into your templates, leading to the potential of a PHP-like mess. Granted, Ruby is a much cleaner language than PHP, but still.)

Unfortunately, to get the most out of Mephisto, you’ve got to be running trunk, and trunk requires Edge Rails. Not that this is immediately a fatal flaw, but for some reason, ever since trunk stopped working with Rails 1.2.3, I haven’t been able to get Mephisto running stably. I keep getting that dreaded 500 error. It doesn’t help that I’m running on shared hosting using Apache and Fast CGI. It doesn’t help that it looks like Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp has been beating the crap out of my host.

Sometimes you’ve got to say enough is enough.

So Simplelog. It’s fast. It’s quick. Faster than Mephisto. Way faster than Typo, which is unfortunately extremely bloated. Simplelog looks pretty nice, too, what with the shading in the title bar that for some reason makes me think of an Apple Macintosh.

The down side. Little nitpicks, really. No dashes allowed in the tags. Underscores instead of dashes in the permalinks. (I’m pretty confident I can fix this with either .htaccess or config/routes.rb.) Crufty permalinks with past in it. (Again, .htaccess or config/routes.rb will likely save the day.) The template engine is Erb, which likes to utilize nested angle-brackets sometimes, and in which it can be tempting to throw in business logic. (Is it possible to use Erubis instead? Hmmm.)

Let’s see how long I’ll keep running this before jumping back to Mephisto.

(Actual tips and tricks on how to migrate to follow!)