Monkeytreats

Ok, now I’m finally up and running on Mephisto, having discarded Typo, having discarded WordPress, having discarded Movable Type, having discarded Blogger. Unfortunately the site will be sans my custom theme for awhile. Regardless, I give myself 24, maybe 36 hours before I find out about some new extra-buzzword-compliant blog package and start getting itchy again.

Alas, poor dork. I knew him.

I’ve punted to the default Typo theme for now, while I plan my escape to Mephisto.

In other news, I’m getting used to the MacBook Pro much faster than I expected I would. Quicksilver is certainly easing things quite a bit. I still wish I could turn off &%$#^% mouse acceleration, though. There’s a third-party driver (SideTrack) that will do it, but of course it doesn’t currently work with the newest generation of MBP.

It burns! It burns!

I finally broke down last night, ran out and bought a MacBook Pro. Now I finally can test the site in Safari and Mac Firefox…and man, it ain’t pretty. Apologies to you folks who have been seeing this twisted abomination. I’ll fix it as soon as possible.

I finally had the energy to go back and fool around with Mephisto a bit more. It really is a good piece of software. I particularly like the category system, which will allow me to segregate posts in exactly the manner I was talking about in the last post. It’s also super-awesome that posts are versioned…I don’t think I’ve seen that particular feature before, although maybe I missed it on Movable Type.

I’m definitely going to migrate the blog again. Later, though. Right now I’m tired and irritated from bashing my head against the wall all day at work.

One thing that’s becoming readily apparent is that the more I discuss serious nerd stuff on the blog, the less anyone who’s not a huge web dev blog dork will want to read it. Consequently, I’m thinking about ways of moving that stuff off the home page, or filtering the home page content according to user preferences.

It doesn’t seem adequate just to tag it; I’d rather that non-technical readers not have to scroll through fifty pages of my interminable whining about whatever software I’m installing at the moment, in order to get to my tremendously insightful commentary on tacos or whatever.

Having grown annoyed with the continual evaluation of blog software, I decided to instead play around with yet another web server for a change of pace. Which is sort of like asking to be kicked in the head because you’re tired of getting kicked in the ass, but no matter.

LiteSpeed is interesting. For me, it wasn’t by any means as easy to install as it’s been made out to be. Also, the UI for the web admin interface has some really serious flaws.

All that said, though, once I finished monkeying with permissions and doing about my eighth fresh install, it’s running and it seems pretty decent. I like the idea of not running an arbitrary number of fixed Mongrel processes per Rails application, or having to maintain a separate application server daemon at all. I also like having a web interface for the admin, even if it’s flawed. I’ve missed having that functionality since I stopped working with Roxen and Caudium back in the day.

At this point, if I try nginx, Pound and Radiant, I’ll have done pretty much the Grand Tour of Rails platforms, both server and CMS.

If you run Typo and Mephisto on the same domain, with Typo on port 80 and Mephisto somewhere else, if you make a page request in the Mephisto admin, it will log you out of the Typo admin. The converse of that is not true–page requests in Typo won’t bump you out of Mephisto.

It’s a weird edge case, so I can’t imagine anyone will particularly care to fix it, and it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort. Annoying, though.

That last dino-sized post almost was eaten by the blog grues. I think Mephisto’s session cookie conflicts with Typo’s, or something–I was logged out in the middle of writing it. Maybe it’s just a Typo bug, I’m not sure.

Either way, I’m pretty unimpressed that neither Typo nor Mephisto have JavaScript functions like WordPress to keep you from navigating away from an unsaved page, and I think it sucks ass that you could ever be forced to relogin without then seamlessly saving the form you just submitted.

I’m starting to hate the number of options I have available to me. Stick with Typo because it basically works? Go with Mephisto and hope it does the job even though it’s not super-mature and is driving me nuts? Switch to Radiant? Roll my own?

Perhaps I’ll just avoid blogging altogether in favor of rocking compulsively back and forth in my chair and swearing to myself under my breath.

Ugh. I just got Typo set up and working great, was starting to get some real writing done and…I found out that none of the cool kids are using Typo anymore, that’s so September 2006. Now all the cool kids are using Mephisto.

So my first reaction, of course, is, well, fuck those cool kids, this works fine for me. But then I start reading about Typo being a memory hog, and thinking about how the main Typo site has been down for months, and reading about how a lot of the userbase has moved to Mephisto, leaving less resources for Typo…

Fine, so I’ll evaluate Mephisto, although I’m starting to feel like I’m chasing the flavor of the month. I download it, run it, the database creation script doesn’t work. I dig around in the wiki and on Google for ten minutes before I figure out that I need to freeze Edge Rails. Rails frozen, I finally get it running. Doesn’t look very interesting.

I run the Typo-to-Mephisto conversion script. It chokes on my old imported Typo-via-WordPress-via-Blogger comments, because there’s no IP stored for those commenters. Fine, whatever. I go into MySQL and set the IP on every comment or blog post to “127.0.0.1”. Migration works, only I have a user record in the database that doesn’t show up in the user editing interface, so I have to go into the database again and wipe that record.

So…ok! It’s working! Only now some of the posts that I did in Typo, using Markdown as a text filter, are now being interpreted by Textile. So I have to go in. To each of those posts. And change the filter. And save the post.

So now it’s working. But the default theme is pretty sparse. So I go get Scribbish to get me through in the short-term, and to use as a basis for my own Monkeytreats theme later on. There’s an awesome looking theme manager interface, with AJAXed-up theme uploads, so I go upload Scribbish.

Which fails.

So I go to get another theme, to see if it’s just this particular one. Most of the themes listed on the Mephisto wiki either:

1. no longer exist
2. can only be pulled from svn

and I just want to grab something and install it. So that sucks. I finally find one with a readily-available zip file…but it’s not really a zip, it’s a gzip. Mephisto apparently likes for its themes to be zipped. So that doesn’t work.

So I go convert the gzip into a zip. And I upload it. And it still doesn’t work.

I go dig around on the wiki and the Mephisto Google group and just generally on Google, and eventually I find that the error message I’m getting (“Invalid theme uploaded.”) really means that the mime-type your browser is sending for the uploaded file is not what Mephisto is expecting to see.

Firefox 2.0 on Windows, which is what I’m running, feels like calling the zip file an application/binary, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but whatever. On the one hand, it’s really stupid browser behavior, but on the other hand, why hasn’t this app been tested with Windows Firefox?

Griping to myself, I go edit the theme import controller and fix the bug. As annoying as it is to have to fix it, it’s admittedly cool that I could figure out what the problem was and fix it this fast, in a language and a codebase that I have almost no familiarity with.

So now everything is pretty much working. Great, now I can finally go work on my custom theme.

But when I get to the template editing page, there are a bunch of files there that I can edit. Which one do I edit? Hard to say.

Ah, and apparently these are Liquid templates…which means I need to go read about some new domain-specific language that 1% of the programmers in the world use. I’m sure it’s great, and they picked it for really good reasons…but…I’m tired. I just want to slap my XHTML in a page and see something work.

Maybe I’ll have more energy to continue down this path tomorrow, I don’t know. Right now, though, as nice as Mephisto’s admin UI is, I’m just so irritated from beating my head against it that I’m thinking about abandoning it.

In fairness, this is the fifth blogging package I’ve looked at this week, and if Jesus Himself came down from on high and said “Hey dude, try out this new Rails CMS I built, it’s called Bibbly and it cleanses you of your sins,” I’d probably get pissy with him about his install and migration scripts. “How is it that You can turn a loaf into a fish, but you can’t design a God-damn straightforward templating system?”

Sorry, Jesus. No, man, your code is really really clean, I just had been configuring software and drinking whiskey all day. Yeah, we both said some things that I think we both regret. No, we’re cool. You still coming over to play Street Fighter? Sweet, I’ll start making the nachos.

After all that banging around on three separate platforms, I’m finally up and running, and it’s great. I can quit focusing on making nasty code work, and can put effort into refining the design, refining the setup, and actually writing. And what do you know, it actually seems quite fast (due to fragment caching), and it can use WordPress’ Akismet spam plugin. I honestly can’t see a downside to it…although I still think Typo’s UI is a little weird and could stand a usability overhaul.

All this is not to say that Movable Type and WordPress are bad pieces of software, because they aren’t. Plenty of people run sites quite happily on them. It’s also not to say there’s anything wrong with Perl or PHP, because obviously there are people doing a lot of great work in both languages.

The most important thing this has taught me, though, is that if you’re a developer, you should pick a piece of blogging software that’s built in a language and an architecture that makes sense to you. Note that I don’t mean “a language that you have experience with”—I have only passing experience with Rails, and built a whole CMS in PHP once upon a day. I mean a language and an architecture that makes sense to you, as in “Oh, THAT’S why they did that.”

Ideally, it should be a system that occasionally makes you say out loud, “That is so Goddamn cool.”