In the past, I’ve always built full custom web sites. I found the design of blogs too constraining; they seem to emphasize ease of entering simple text over all else. The previous mslater.com was a custom, though simple, site.

As I began to want to do more writing, however, the appeal of a blog increased. I wanted to enable comments and RSS feeds, and it seemed like a waste of time to build those features myself.

At the same time, I began moving my web development work from PHP to Ruby on Rails. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out one of the blog engines for Ruby on Rails. And that’s what you’re seeing now: Mephisto.

With Mephisto, I’ve been able to heavily customize the design of the site using simple templates written in liquid. Since the entire blog engine is open source, I can go in and modify the engine itself if I want (but so far, I haven’t found a need to do so). Since it is in Ruby on the Rails framework, the code is clean, elegant, and reasonably easy to understand (once you grasp the Rails conceptual model). It also has a nice, simple asset manager, so I can easily upload PDF files and images and so forth and use them in my postings.

As time goes on, I expect to experiment with the structure and layout more, and I’ll chronicle these efforts here. I have mixed feelings about the simple reverse chronological layout of blogs and hope to add some refinements that improve its usability. Let me know what you think.