New Blogging System

I’ve been avoiding doing anything with my blogs for a long time. I’d come to dislike the look of my blogs and the nasty fragile hacks that held my movable type system together so I started putting off doing things with my blog until I could change the system. After my experiences hacking movabletype to support threaded comments (version 4 might be better) I decided I wanted an open source blogging system written in a more appropriate language than perl1 with a well designed extension system. Ruby on rails still seems like the right way to go but I didn’t like the typo codebase and mephisto just isn’t mature enough yet to have the extensions I need, e.g., openid, and it’s API still seems to be in flux.

The fact that I’m going to be applying for jobs soon finally inspired me to do something about my web presence and despite being written in php I settled on wordpress based on it’s ease of modification and the amazingly comprehensive list of open source plugins availible. Someday I may still switch to mephisto2 or my own custom code but at the moment wordpress can’t be beat as a practical blogging solution for those of us who want extensive customizations and non-standard features.

For anyone who is interested in the code I’ve written to customize this blog or other related issues I’ll be posting them on my wordpress page.


  1. Perl’s a great language for scripting or gluing things together but perl 5 isn’t as well suited to building complex web applications. From what I’ve read I expect perl 6 will be more appropriate for this sort of task but ruby is really the right choice. 

  2. I hope to explain what I like about the mephisto architecture in a latter post.