Choosing a platform for my blog
For personal coding projects, I decided to abandon PHP as my web platform of choice, a decision which deserves its own post. After a lot of reading and shopping and experimenting, I tentatively decided to go with Ruby on Rails as my new web platform of choice. Other options I liked were python frameworks Django and TurboGears, the Smalltalk framework seaside (which is built on the interesting idea that continuations are natural for a web app that doesn’t want to be stateless), and LISP.
Following in the footsteps of Jacques Distler, I decided that if I was going to switch platforms away from PHP for personal code projects, then it makes sense to also favor a move from PHP for tools (blogs, wikis, etc) I employ. Basically, if you’re using some open source software, and there’s a chance you’ll want to modify the code, then you need that software to be on a platform you want to work on.
So after I decided to ditch the PHP blogging app WordPress, I wouldn’t even look at Movable Type, also PHP. I instead started looking for a rails blogging software. There seemed to be only one of any popularity, viz., Mephisto. With the decision in hand, I’m ready to install.
