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”?

“I’m Rick Olson, I invented friggin Mephisto. Have you heard of it?”

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.]Continue reading →