I'm happily working away on my new blog on my free time. I think I'm going to call it Fullerton, after the El stop I get on to ride to work every day.

Fullerton right now is very bare. I can post articles, and that's it. I've spent a lot of time trying to get the css working. The only data structure I have at this point is Articles. I have two controllers, articles, and frontpage. This morning I figured out how to get Atom feed helpers working in rails. So now I can get RSS syndication going.

I wonder which feed format is better to use: RSS or Atom? Should I provide both? Seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

I really like being able to type blog entries in Textmate and then having it post them out to Mephisto. I'm going to have to replicate this feature in Fullerton.

Luckily, ActiveResource provides me with a restful web service, replacing the balky ActionWebService. I have to fork off the Blogging textmate bundle (or create a new one) to enable Restful blogging.

So here's a thought:

POST http://localhost:3000/articles 
(active resource formatted xml, with authentication)

All I plan on doing at this point is the standard CRUD with active resource.

I hope to get that up and running today. Stay tuned.

On the design front, I have Markdown enabled for writing. Next up, I need to get vibrant ink styled filtered text macros enabled.

Routing wise, i'll have to get permalinks setup, and learn the real way to do rails routing. I've been getting by on just using Resources for now.

Another feature I hope to add is a tag cloud. That's later down the line

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

I finally updated my to include my WWR profile to include photo and this website address.