the Onda

Back in the day, a friend of mine told me that every budding Perl geek eventually gets around to writing his own CMS (Content Management System). Given how many different half-baked blog tools are out in Sourceforge for the taking, I tend to agree with him.

It's really tempting to sit down and roll my own tool at this point. Neither Movable Type (ugh, agenda?) nor Wordpress (ugh, mess!) have all of the features that I want in my own CMS, especially when it comes to formatting and simple extensibility. I thought briefly about bloxsom (or more specifically, its saner cousin pybloxsom) because it follows the unixy less-is-more principle so well, but sometimes less is actually less and the lack of multiple categories per entry when combined with metadata that is tied too closely to the filesystem turned me off (though I have to admit that having a simple 1-file script to hack on was very appealing).

My next thought was to use one of the hosted services. First there was the venerable Blogger which looks like it's gotten a Googlesque upgrade. I've tried blogger before and liked the thought that has gone into making it easy. But at this point in 2005, it feels a bit behind the times to me. Then of course, there is the subscription-only Typepad which seems to be spreading like wildfire and has a nice feel to it as well. The problem there is that once you've seen 5 TP blogs they all sort of start to look the same (I'm sure this is not totally SixApart's fault, people are just sort of lazy).

Plus, at the end of the day, what fun is it to outsource these types of headaches to someone else?

Seriously though, there is something incredibly compelling to me about the way in which publish/subscribe works in the blogosphere: everything from RSS/atom feeds to trackbacks and pingbacks and whatever else may come behind that (FOAF-rolls, etc. etc.). Because the hosted services are trying to break beyond the alpha geeks to some some of early adopter crowd, they sometimes get a little behind the bleeding edge on implementing this stuff (especially implementing them in a playful, who-knows-where-this-is-going-to-go way).

And so, it was back to looking for a pile of code to play with-- headaches and all.

So as not to be called biased, I looked at some of the Java options that are out there. Unfortunately as a general rule, I find that someone has to pay me to type more than 50 open and close brackets within any config file so all of these were dismissed after the second "then fiddle with web.xml in line 4950 to add your blog name" directive in the README file.

Then I found Typo. It's young but it supports all the fun stuff I wanted to play with. More importantly it's built on the red-hot RubyOnRails framework that has got everyone foaming at the mouth (either for or against). Since I personally am not quite foaming about RoR yet (coming from Perl Ruby is the salvation, but since I'm coming from Guido's camp, it's not quite as amazing to me), I figured that this would be a great chance to experiment.

And I have to say, thus far I am duly impressed by the little that I've played with Rails thus far. Though I don't often like to admit it, one thing I miss from my java/tomcat days was the consistency of application layouts that deployment standards brought to the table. You could download someone else's java app and know where things were supposed to be because of the standards. In the wild of perl/python web apps, each author does his own thing with config files, other assets, supporting libs etc. even across the same web framework. The RoR way appears to be to standardize deployment hierarchy (read: sane) that is well thought out enough for an RoR newbie like me to find his way around.

So we will see. From what I can gather, Typo started as a fun experiment with RoR (while its author was waiting for a client at a coffee shop) and then picked up steam. My only criticism thus far is with the default stylesheet which feels sort of glommed together, though in truth I have seen PHP apps with stylesheets that make typo.css one look like Donald Knuth code.

Yet another dude trying to write his own CMS. Now that is definitely a good sign.

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