End of an Era

From the department of “no one could care less”, I have switched the software that runs this blog from Mephisto to WordPress.

This will represent the fourth different blog platform that I have run this blog with. I switched to Mephisto (and typo before it) with the idea that I’d eventually write plugins or themes to help support my blog, since I know a thing or two about Ruby. That really never happened. So let’s let the rising tide of Wordpress work for me.

As pretty much everything hip in the Ruby and Rails sphere is doing this days, Mephisto has moved to Logical Awesome’s GitHub, which is a great philosophical fit with the way Mephisto development has gone in general. Namely, let the developers get at their work, and lean on the community for documentation and support.

The plus is was able to make a great many changes and check them in to my own local version of the repository, managing it independently. By maintaining different remotes, I can bring anyone else’s work on Mephisto into my own installation.

The minus is that the developers now assume that all users have this ability. There is some kind of energy pattern around the core contributers vs. those informed users (like myself) who could possibly document, and the generally interested who “know Rails” but are fed curveballs by Mephisto’s decidedly non-standard Rails-ness, etc. This also makes things like upgrading and reconciling mephisto plugins a specially tedious chore. I am making the decision not to spend time on this.

The Mephisto to Wordpress convertor on GitHub worked flawlessly the first time (!) and I was on the ground with WordPress almost instantly. Hats off, and thanks to Matt Walters and his Wordpress Easily platform which allows me a great level of control for an exceptionally reasonable price.