Musings of a Trained Monkey

I am done with Liquid Templates. I grasp the idea of “user” editable code that is “safe”, but I don’t want to spend my time programming with it. Having spent time with Mephisto and working through the leakiness of the Liquid Template abstraction, I now have an even greater appreciation for coding templates directly in Ruby.

This just confirms the wisdom of prophet DHH about “The false promise of template languages”. <-That was posted back on Valentine’s Day 2005!

I am not a designer (INAD?) so why would I choose a blogging engine that doesn’t cater to me as a programmer? As a programmer, using Liquid is the equivalent to having to wear a condom, all the time. I want the full Ruby sensation, thanks!

I've been learning the ins and outs of working with Rick Olson's new Blogging/CMS Lite project, Mephisto. I've been impressed so far. Feature wise it offers a lot for as small as the code base is.

Using Liquid templates instead of rhtml is taking some getting used to. I have a close port of this Typo blog running on my laptop. I am still ironing out some kinks with interpretation of <pre> and <code> tags between Typo and Mephisto. Mainly my older posts with code included have issues. I do miss some of the sidebar functionality and I will be taking a look at adding a "feedparser section" to be able to recreate some of the sidebars in Mephisto.

Rick and company seem to have implemented caching the right way, everything just works and is fast! I can definitely see why the Rails blog decided to make the switch.