RedProcess

I think I tinker with blogging software more than I actually do any blogging. I get urges to write, but get slightly irritated by the interfaces blog software provides. Of late, I've been using TextMate's blogging bundle to write with and interface with WordPress. This ultimately makes WordPress transparent, I just have to deal with its theming and plugin system.

One also has to bear with its horrible, twisted spaghetti internals. It works, lest you attempt to look at anything in wp-includes to see exactly how it works. I like to know how things operate, such is the kind of nerd I am.

I'm the kind of nerd that's interested in not only the speed and freedom of a motorcycle, but also the dynamics of grip, traction, and gyroscopic forces. It's all terribly fascinating.

So I've ditched WordPress. I use it every day at work, and that's quite enough, thank you. Instead, with the help of Django, I've done what I've been considering doing for years, and built my own web log platform. Using some obvious tumble log ideas...

Python

This project is my first real foray into Python, after resisting it for so many years. I never quite grokked it before, with its strange customs of colons and whitespace. Not that whitespace is a concern to me, I've always embraced code indenting. The language of code importing often turned me off. And, most importantly to me, what appeared to be a completely half-hearted object orientation, compared to Ruby, was very upsetting.

I've been a huge proponent of Ruby over the past few years. I have a fetish for anything inspired by Smalltalk (Objective-C is fairly awesome in this regard). Python definitely isn't Smalltalk inspired. Somewhere along the line Python just started making sense. I overcame the way method calls return variables in a different manner to Ruby. Not every method can be chained, and that's OK. I will have to use functions in the same way I would chain objects. Fine. I can live with that for the speed and memory use you give me, compared to Ruby.

Merb

For the better part of a week I tried Merb, as a lightweight alternative to Rails. Unfortunately for me, it felt like an utterly castrated version of Rails. The modular structure was great, I could pick and choose features. Unfortunately it really missed a lot of features I used in Rails, and poor documentation meant I was never really sure of what was available.

Django

Instead of running back to Rails, I took a look at Django, the completely modular nature of it made sense, I could pick and choose features! In a small way it helped me understand Python, and accept the way it works. I had looked at Django once before, but it didn't make sense, I couldn't get a feel of how any of it fit together. Now I see anything I need is just one import statement away.

So here I am, with a fast, lightweight, blog application. Over half the size of anything comparable in Ruby. Perhaps I'll write more, now I have an interface I actually want to use. I just need to finish the quick blogging bookmarklet doodad...