It seems to be a familiar tune to see a blog powered by Ruby on Rails to switch from Typo, Mephisto or Simplelog to WordPress. WordPress may not be as new or exciting, but it has features that really matter. It’s stable, it’s actively developed and it’s not resource intensive. Also it’ll work great with my favorite blog editor MarsEdit.
I first blogged on a WordPress blog. When Textpattern came out I switched to it. Then I switched back to WordPress when Textpattern didn’t quite scratch my itch. Then came a long flirtation with blogs built using Ruby on Rails. First there was Typo and it was good, but it didn’t work well on shared hosting. It became more and more bloated and harder to deal with. Next I switched to Mephisto, which was good, but it required using the Liquid templating language, which severely limited the ease and power of the templates. Then came Simplelog which is slick and most of what I want from a blogging engine, but development has stopped. When I’ve looked at the code intending to implement the features I want, it becomes a toss-up if I should just start from scratch or try working them in. All the time WordPress has been sitting quietly on the sidelines with all the features I want, it just doesn’t have a useless yellow (or should I say Ruby) vinyl sticker that makes it seem cooler to this web geek.