Hmm it looks like my rant touched off a spirited defense from the writer of Mephisto.
Hey, that’s my blogging system! I’m just curious what kind of error page a bad url should show? Something like this?
And yes, the mephisto title is me having fun. Lighten up, dude
I never said it wasn’t shitty, but it scales just fine.
—rick, the creator of Mephisto
I’ll admit, I was a little harsh on Rick. Shit, anyone who calls himself “technoweenie” is probably someone I need to kick of few beers back with—preferably with the Plasq peeps so we don’t have to spring money when Skitch is out of beta.
Any way you cut it, it’s ballsy to say Mephisto “scales just fine” given that WordPress does not and it’d pretty much crushes Mephisto out of the box on on availability, ease of install, extensibility, performance, and scalability.
That’s typical of Ruby programmers, always making outlandish claims that aren’t true and then saying that I have the burden to prove the negative.
Speaking of Skitch, How’s this for “lightening up”?
You’re not going to demand that I prove that Mephisto isn’t “the best blogging system ever” are you, Matt? 
(This is a reference to WordPress’s funding.)
BTW, unlike his Ruby compatriots so quick to throw him to the wolves, I actually like that he is writing Mephisto in Rails. When Matt was forking b2 to write WordPress in PHP, I thought MoveableType had won and I was perfectly happy installing mod_perl. So what do I know?
As to Rick’s “curiosity,” Mephisto shouldn’t generate or allow a post slug with “/” or “:” etc or, if it does allow it, it should encode it. In the screenshot you linked, I don’t have that post slug on this blog with that URL and WordPress wouldn’t allow it so the screenshot he took is moot. It does, however, show my great taste in WordPress themes.
[more Ruby bashing after the jump.]
Ruby gang bang
What touched off the comment was that a bunch of RORcats were harassing me on twitter that the error page message doesn’t prove that Ruby doesn’t scale because “Mephisto is crappy, not Ruby (which is superior)”, but that wasn’t the point at all!
My point is that someone who would choose to use Ruby to develop a social network and content management system over the advice of their experienced colleagues is the same hubris that causes one to use Mephisto as a blogging platform over a proven solution like Moveable Type or WordPress for something as simple as a corporate blog. It’s called not invented here and the Ruby world has a horrible (all caps) case of it.
Then when I call them out on this, they think that I am saying that “Ruby can’t scale.” I never said this. I said programmers who choose to use Ruby don’t know scalability. See the difference?
It’s about making choices and the consequences that follow from those choices.
For instance, this blog has been hacked twice. I teased Matt about that and how ugly the codebase is the last time I saw him. That’s a consequence. If I actually had a problem with all the stuff I shit talk, I’d be using s9y or something similarly lame. 
Not Invented Here
I think Not Invented Here and the overly defensive nature of people like Rick is because the “convention over configuration” demands a religious zeal and myopia as a consequence.
Hmm, in fact, in light of my admission that Mephisto is “the best blogging system ever,” I should change this blog’s title “The Woodwork: wherein I prove that Ruby developers are all cultish morons.”
And then when these defensive shits comment on it, I’ll google them and poo over their comments saying, “I never said Ruby can’t scale, so lighten up, dude.”
