I’ve really been enjoying Mephisto, the blogging software that’s running this site.

I wanted to create another blog for some reviews I’ve written. So I started with the standard Mephisto and chose a theme from a Mephisto theme gallery and things were looking pretty nice. Then I wanted to start making some customizations. I considered using the plugin system that ships with Mephisto but I thought I’d just opt for a completely custom system and see if it would be difficult to have complete flexibility.

It turns out that it was super cinchy to do. Mephisto is open source, and it’s a well-written rails app. The technology world sure is changing in some fascinating ways. When you put some things together like ruby, rails, open source, the mac, quicksilver, and textmate, things start to get pretty exciting for developers.

I’ve made a few customizations so far and I’m not sure if I’ll ever want to customize it further. For now though, it’s much easier to mark a review as thumbs up or thumbs down and it’s easy to specify an amazon url for a review and know that it’ll show up with the correct amazon associates url.

One of the many amazing things about Rails is that you can so easily sit down and completely modify a Rails app you’ve never seen before, primarily because the framework makes it painful to step outside convention. I couldn’t even imagine doing something like this in some of the other web frameworks out there.

Here’s what Revnut looks like so far.