I am proudly launch­ing Blog 3.0. Yes, this is the third start from scratch of my blog within 3 years and inter­est­ingly each time it was on a dif­fer­ent platform!

I launched Blog 1.0 in Jan­u­ary 2006. I chose Typo, but its first ver­sions were not quite sta­ble and often my blog was offline for hours and some­times even days. Often it took min­utes to load even though it was run­ning on a beefy ded­i­cated server. I’m still not sure if I have to “thank” lighttpd or Typo for the headaches, but it wasn’t a pleas­ant experience.

Then, after being offline for quite some time, I fell in love with Mephisto and I launched Blog 2.0 and it was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence! Mephisto was fast and sta­ble and my only prob­lem was that its devel­op­ment has been spo­radic and then it stalled. Even many have cloned it on GitHub already, the main line is still pro­gress­ing slowly and not ben­e­fit­ing from all that col­lab­o­ra­tive effort. Any­way, it worked OK for me.

Unfor­tu­nately, due to some prob­lems with Pay­Pal’s recur­ring billing, my host­ing com­pany vps­Farm can­celed my account and I lost my blog. Pathetic, I know, but I didn’t have a copy of my cus­tomized Mephisto and I lost every­thing! Argh!

There’s now a third plat­form built with Ruby on Rails — Chameleon, but its devel­op­ment also stalled after run­ning out of the ini­tial enthu­si­asm. Sim­i­larly to Mephisto, it’s using Liq­uid tem­plates. Typo is more active recently and has new leads, but I will it con­tinue at this pace? I don’t know…

I am a big and loyal fan of Ruby on Rails, but the blog­ging plat­forms built with it lack incen­tive to move for­ward and fast being over­shad­owed by Mov­able­Type and Word­Press. It makes the most sense those Ruby on Rails plat­forms to com­bine efforts into a sin­gle one, but I don’t kid myself that it will hap­pen soon if ever. So, I looked into Mov­able­Type and Word­Press for my Blog 3.0 and they are pretty much at par. Due to the fact that I know PHP and don’t know any Perl, I nat­u­rally chose Word­Press. I am also look­ing for­ward to Ver­sion 2.7 of the plat­form, which seems really great.