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perhaps it is my vanity to blame for having chosen to run the blog software myself; of course this is an opportunity to waste an enormous amount of time tweaking the blog engine and themes, instituting a backup schedule, installing updates, fighting bugs - precisely what I have been doing with typo.

I’ve chosen typo over wordpress and mt, since I wanted to play with rails (and what blog-aware netizen is not guilty of drinking the kool-aid these days?). obviously it is still very much a beta software - I’ve spent a few hours trying to install it under www.domainname.com/blog, finally throwing in the towel and resorting to blog.domainname.com setup; the sidebar admin interface is buggy, not remembering the values, or populating them with defaults like “feed” and “null”; same goes for the comment posting interface under IE; not to mention that it is crazy resource pig - fcgi and all, it takes a few seconds to generate a non-cached page (I bet it is something to do with restarting processes and cgi and rails startup slowness in general - but I have not looked at it in details yet). oh and despite their oh-so-smug note, do not use trunk - a flurry of migration commits this weekend was a good lesson.

so now it is just a matter of time - either the newness wears off, pragmatism takes over and I switch to a proven platform, or typo matures enough to be usable.

it is a cute toy, buzzword-compliant, and still shiny and new to justify spending the time playing with it. I should try and track down a bug or two, to make up for all the bile in the paragraphs above.

i am yet to find out what kind of syntax it supports for the posts (it better not be a subset of straight html), useful wiki-like macros, uploading images, etc.