Ah, I see what you’re talking about. They actually put a url into the permalink field? That’s hilarious. Mephisto does encode permalinks, but assumes the author knows what they’re doing when they put in manual permalinks.

I run the rubyonrails.com/weblog.rubyonrails.com/prototypejs.org sites on a cluster of processes on a single server. The key is I implement probably the same caching features that those WP caching plugins do out of the box. That’ll get me by for a long time before I have to look at multiple data centers, CDN’s, sharded databases, etc. But, that’s all out of scope for a little open source blog platform.

As for why these startups are using Mephisto for a boring corporate blog? No idea. I guess they have the infrastructure in place for serving rails apps, or want to show love to the rails community? I wholeheartedly agree with the NIH argument, though. Seriously, writing a blog engine is boring as shit once the honeymoon is over.

Finally… The tag line was more funny when taken in context with my major releases named after lame cosmic marvel comics characters. But now I suppose it’s a bit pathetic considering the latest major release was about 18 months ago.

As for “lame” at a certain point you have to think what you have time for. Wordpress has a large community of developers (as did Moveable-Type) with a huge number of people who know how to install, maintain, design for, and optimize it. It’s easy to install, etc. When security isn’t an issue (I suppose if I got a malicious hack, I could always rebuild my database and reinstall), I don’t know why someone shouldn’t use Wordpress over s9y.

@till:
I’ll have to address this in a once and future post (as in, I wrote it last summer, I just haven’t published it). The title should be: “That Kung Fu experience.”

What makes me always curious about things [framework, language, whatever] is when people say (for example), “Oh, I’ve done PHP for ages and found Rails and I absolutely love it. I am not doing PHP ever again.”. I met some RoR people in NYC last year and one of them felt like he needed to argue RoR over PHP with me when he my client introduced me to him and I just realized that he didn’t have a super-clue about PHP.

Whatever he said I was able to disprove and I’m a) not the smartest person on the planet, b) not the best(est) PHP coder ever, c) had too many drinks that night and d) my English is suck too. I just realized (since this wasn’t my only encounter of this sort) that most of those people who run to RoR wrote terrible PHP too. Stuff I get to fix when I migrate clients to a new major PHP release. I just hope their rails apps don’t suffer from the same problems sooner or later.

One of my clients also did a RoR project lately and on the one side it’s pretty cool how fast the company they hired came out with a ready project. Kudos to them. It also looks pretty (a major advantage over many RoR apps over their PHP counterparts) and works.

But I also have to mention that they started out with a footprint of 15 servers and now (not even three months later) had to double the capacity. But not just because traffic doubled, etc.. The bright side of this dilemma is that EC2 is pretty cheap and that their app apparently scales pretty well - when you throw enough hardware at it.

Though this is not very convincing.

If time permits, I’m gonna check out Merb next. It’s another Ruby framework and I read good things about it.

Duke

Supposed to be fixed in Firefox 3. Personally, I wish they just fixed the beachball of death:
http://terrychay.com/blog/article/back-to-safari.shtml

(I think Second Systems are the worst idea in the history of software development—it doesn’t matter whether it is rewriting PHP apps in Ruby, or Perl apps in PHP, or Java apps in PHP. Heck, I’m not even a fan of rewriting PHP apps in PHP!)