Posted by sam, Sun Feb 17 23:58:00 UTC 2008

I think I've outgrown Mephisto. I have to manage three Mephisto installations(including this blog), but it's turning into kind of a hassle.

I also want to fully learn more about the rails framework, beyond what I currently know.

In fact, I'm following the advice of Geoff Grosenbach

I’ll add to this and say that every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software. It’s a great learning experience and you can try things that aren’t possible with just an app running on localhost. It’s also a great environment for learning without the pressure of a mission-critical app. When you’re working for a client and deploying an important application, you’ll have made all the beginner mistakes on your own time (hopefully).

Now, I'm no beginner. I've first learned about Rails while bored at work in December 2005, then later that night I dipped my toe into the framework on my windows machine following the classic Rollling with Ruby on Rails articles I've been using rails professionally since september 2006.

I'm not the only one who's doing a new rails blog. Josh Susser said it best recently,

Mephisto is a solid piece of software, but it's too big for me, and that makes it hard to modify to do what I want. It's development has also lagged - no new release in over a year! And, I wanted something that ran on Rails 2

Mephisto actually runs on Rails 2.0 right now. And the development of the framework has accelerated, somewhat.

Rick's actually moved development of Mephisto over to git. git://activereload.net/mephisto.git

I think this is a good sign.

Regardless, Mephisto is sometimes kind of bloated.

My goals on my new blog software.

• I'm going to use Rspec the entire time.
• I also want to be able to type blog entries from Textmate and post to the server.
• Seeing how the ActionWebservice is gone, I think i'll have to use ActiveResource, and also modify Textmate's blogging bundle to accommodate ActiveResource for blogging.
• Code Macros
• Flickr Integration
• Tag Clouds
• Delicious integration
• Built in thickbox javascripts
• Markdown/html/Textile posting
• Pinging to other weblog services.

And lastly, I have to pick a name.

I'm developing this in Git, but I wont make the repo public until it's somewhat usable

Filed Under: | Tags: blog newblog rails rspec