Was not that hard? Writing the first post, I mean. Finding a blogging engine, however, suitable for my need was quite a task. I’m learning Rails, so I’d prefer a Rails option, of course. Other requirements were:

• easy to set-up
• easy to customize
• support for other languages (I have another blog in Finnish)
• simple (all I need is blog posting, simple formatting, commenting, RSS, tags and search)

The most active Rails blogging platform is Typo. Rails 2.0 compatible version 5.0 was just released. It “felt” mature and it would likely be end of my quest. Typo was straightforward to set up and it had an installer setting everything nicely up. Typo “had it all” and more, perhaps too much for me. Installing a new theme was a peace of cake. Sadly, non of the themes I tried worked. Actually, I could not switch back to fully working original theme. After poking around awhile, and could not get it working, I said ‘no no’ to Typo.

The next obvious option was Mephisto. Why obvious? Because most Rails gurus use it and the official Ruby on Rails weblog runs on it. I, however, was a bit suspicious — the latest release was year and half old, and the official blog seemed pretty much dead (the fourth article in the blog asked Is Mephisto Dead?). Well, I learnt that Mephisto is dead from the average blogger point of view.

To-be-come-one-another-guru-Rails-consultant I was not afraid to give Mephisto a fair chance. Grabbing the latest version 0.7.3 and running it with my Rails installation 1.2.X did not work. I couldn’t get the database structure created by typing rake db:bootstrap. After a short and painful battle I gave up and checked out the latest Mephisto version from the version control. No luck in getting it working, despite the fact that I had a brand new Rails 2.0.2 installed. After heavy googling I found out I also need to have correct versions of gem (1.0.1 works) and rake (0.8.1 works) installed. I finally got Mephisto that did not give annoying error messages when I tried to run something as simple as rake db:bootstrap. Now error messages were now absent, but still no hope for a working database. I investigated the situation further and found out that schema.rb was pretty much empty.

Needless to say I was frustrated and had no choice but continue my quest. The next candidate SimpleLog had the simplicity I appreciate. It was not hard to setup. I couldn’t, however, get it as shiny as the screenshots from the author’s site were. Actually, there were no graphics or stylesheets anywhere in my new blog. It probably was something simple to fix, but after a short investigation I did not find out what. Sorry Garrett, I ditched your little blogging software, but I still subscribe to your excellent (and funny) podcasts.

The next candidate I found is a true gem. Radiant CMS is something I will probably use in the future. Perhaps in the very near future as we are renewing the website of my “other work” at Futurice. I did not install Radiant, but spent some time investigating it. Radiant was like breathing fresh air after dirtying my hands with Plone. Now, I’m not saying Plone is not a fine CMS platform, but the simplicity of Radiant CMS won at least a small piece of my heart. Too bad, Radiant is not good enough as a blogging platform, even though it could be used for blogging (and some do). According to this presentation the next Radiant version 0.7 could be something for bloggers, but I would not buy these promises just yet.

I was fed enough to forget the “Rails requirement” and ready to try out something totally different. Something mature, I mean. PHP blogging options are many and one of the best known is Wordpress. I already had an Apache with PHP running, so installing (production ready) blog was simple. IMHO, so simple that Ruby/Rails should learn something about it. To install a new theme worked like a charm. So far, no complaints. Then I needed to customize it for my Finnish blog. It seemed I had two options: to install a Finnish version of Wordpress (which was two decades old) or to customize a theme of my choice. I picked the latter option only to find out how bloated the theme was and how horrible the customization felt with PHP. I started to feel sick, and went back to drawing board.

Actually, I went to watch a great movie and had a good night´s sleep. In the morning I felt strong and told myself to make the blog running within next two hours. I was smart enough to copy the schema.rb from Mephisto 0.7.3 installation, run rake db:bootstrap and rake db:migrate and got it running. I also found excellent Skittish theme, which was very easy to customize (even the Finnish version). The only problem left was I had no comments. I found out that you need to launch Mephisto in production mode (e.g. script/server -e production) to get commenting enabled. As a side-note, Mephisto truly needs a more active community around to survive. Now, however, it “works for me” and seem to work very well.

One option would have been “write-it-yourself” approach. There are many tutorials written such as Creating a blog in Ruby on Rails in more than 15 minutes. I considered this option, but decided I want to learn Rails with the actual project I will start doing. It will be much longer quest than launching this blog ever was.