I’ve always tried to run this site with Ruby on Rails solutions. I’m not a Rails specialist at all, but I love Ruby since before Rails even existed. I find this language beautiful and I use it for everything I can.
I used Typo then Mephisto. Typo has become a bit of a nightmare, but Mephisto is really nice. The problem is, no matter how hard I try, those RoR blog engines can’t run on my shared server without problem. I still have the SimpleLog and Radiant options, but at this time I’m tired to fight to keep a simple website alive.
I bought a TextDrive “lifetime” account two years ago and I don’t want to spend any more money just to run a blog. The bidwell server where my account is has been rock solid for many months, due to enforced limits on CPU and RAM usage for the users, I guess. And considering the freedom TextDrive gives us, it’s a good thing. So it’s 48MB RAM for me, no more. Again, I think this should be enough to run a small blog. Mephisto uses less than that… when there is no traffic ;). As soon as there is a bit more load, it’s over (And I’m talking about really low traffic here).
So I ported the theme and moved gT to WordPress. WP has kept getting better since I last tried it and the community, plugins, etc. give you a lot of choices to do things like you want. This also mean I’m back on good ol’ Apache (from lighttpd then Mongrel), so I don’t have to worry about the server software anymore.
Another benefit with this switch is I can post from TextMate and thanks to Remy Sharp’s trick, I can use Ultimate Tag Warrior’s tags from TM too. Excellent.
I’m pleased with the change although a bit sad to have to dig in PHP code instead of Ruby sweetness. But it’s a one time problem (or at least one time every theme change ;) and I can stop thinking about the site running or not.