I don't want preferences
Or why I’m writing another blog engine for ruby
I’ve been running this site on Mephisto for a number of months now. It is fantastic at what it does, but I’ve just recently realised it’s not what I want.
I want to configure my blog by hacking code
I don’t want preferences or theme support – I want to edit code. Mephisto isn’t great for this – it uses non standard routing (everything goes through dispatch), it uses liquid templates. I feel like I have to learn Mephisto to hack it. SimpleLog is another rails option, but it sucks because it reads like a PHP app, and I don’t want to be hacking that. It’s built to be configured, not to be hacked.
So here is my grand plan.
An opinionated blog engine that does things my way. OpenID login, XHTML valid default template, RESTful stuff, code highlighting in comments, etc… To install, you branch my master git repo and customize away. You can just keep rebasing to get all the trunk updates. You can publish a ‘theme’ in the form of a patch against trunk. The code is going to be lean since I don’t need to accommodate for 5, 10 or 15 articles per page, so it will be easy to comprehend.
Basically, it’s so you can write your own blog without having to worry about boring stuff like admin, defensio integration, and OpenID auth.
I wonder what I’ll call it.
UPDATE: Look I made it – Enki
January 04, 2008 at 1:23 AM
Call it Roboblog!
January 06, 2008 at 9:07 PM
Interesting. I'm doing the same thing, for much the same reasons. I don't even have a UsersController in admin, just a rake task to create users (which will probably only ever happen once). It's just about functional now and it's only 500 lines of code (not counting plugins). Should be ready for prime time in a week or so... How's yours going?
January 14, 2008 at 1:41 AM
Sounds great Xavier! I started writing a blog engine just b/c I wanted to have comments per-paragraph (like on Jack Slocum's blog *), and TinyMCE instead of markup for input. I'm not going to finish it, but if you want, you're welcome to what I've done.
January 17, 2008 at 10:02 PM
Sounds very interesting Xavier, I'd love to see it and hack away at it once it's finished.
I think you should call it Moke..