Hoopla!

Why, Mr. Visitor, I'm glad you asked.

I had some big changes in my life a few months ago and I stopped paying as much attention as I should to how my blog was faring. After a lovely vacation I returned home to find that all my site could do was spit out 500 errors. Slowly.

The culprit was a combination of Typo's complexity, my site's popularity with the search engines, and some lovely folks engaged in the occupation of spamming. Typo has some spam protection capabilities including integration with Akismet. One of the things it can do is lookup the ips of various commenters and compare them to blacklists.

What my installation was doing was looking up the ip of every commenter on every page load. EVERY PAGE LOAD. Even when I copied the data and code to my home test box I couldn't get a page to load in less that 27 seconds.

So so long Typo. Mephisto, here we come. It was time to try the new kid on the block. I figure it only makes sense considering even Typo's creator has switched to using Mephisto.

Current issues with Mephisto still:

• can't install it in a subdirectory (as much a problem of Rails as of Mephisto)
• Mephisto trunk can't run on Dreamhost unless you compile your own version of Ruby 1.8.5 (WhiteList Helper and the delegate method both fail)
• Underdeveloped theme system and theme library.

Awesome stuff:

• Rick has written some phenomenal code into this thing
• Cristi Balan has developed a gorgeous theme.
• it's got a converter to migrate blogs from Typo :-)