Deciding on a blog platform wasn’t very easy – after some reading, I managed to pick just three in the “finals”: Mephisto, Typo and Wordpress. I wanted something that runs on Ruby on Rails, since it would prove to be a new opportunity for me to get used more to this environment, but Wordpress did seem to have a lot of features, plugins and in general, it proved to be a very stable platform.

But in the same time Wordpress did seem a bit too bloated – and at least on my machine it ran very slow; the interface is very well polished, but in the same time I felt that it was hiding way too many things from me. It is probably one of the platforms with the most functionality, but it just didn’t appeal to me.

Another possible choice was Typo, a widely used Ruby on Rails blog platform – with many features, but again – maybe a bit too many for me. I also didn’t like the AJAX effects on the admin page, somehow they just didn’t seem natural (at one point it even felt a bit buggy, but I haven’t tested it enough to figure out the problem). On the other hand, Typo did seem very simple to use and install – and it’s also under active development.

Mephisto looked like a perfect choice right from the beginning. The installation was very smooth and I was surprised how clean and arranged everything is internally. The admin interface is very simple, yet it has everything that I need. There’s also a new addition, an “assets” feature that allows you to keep track of your photos, movies or anything else that you might want to upload – and eventually attach some of them to your posts (there’s a bucket for picking up the items that you like).

There are of course other platforms as well. The fact that I chose Mephisto was more or less a personal decision, very subjective nevertheless. I’m sure many would prefer Wordpress, Typo, Drupal, or any other platform – since everyone has different demands and expectations. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what it is – after changing a bit the theme, the interface – the normal visitor won’t notice a lot.

This is also the first post in this blog, hopefully one of the many.