Russell's Blog

For the last couple of years, I've been running Typo, a Ruby on Rails blogging tool. It was nice, but there were a few persistent problems I encountered :

• It was sloooooow. Nothing I did seemed to get it to run faster, even with carefully tuned caching.
• It was unstable. Typo would run happily for months, and then mysteriously explode. This usually happened while I was traveling, or busy with something more important.
• It was difficult to fix. Usually, when Typo would come down, it took a few days of research and pestering people to figure out why.
• The database migrations between versions were awful. You'll notice that the first year of posts don't have any tags. They were deleted by a bad migration. I have backups, but merging them back in is nightmarish.

A lot of the problems I experienced are with older versions of Typo. They've definitely gotten better over the years. But there is one big reason I'm abandoning Typo; I don't want to code in Ruby. I do most of my coding in python. I like python. I seems silly not to use the knowledge I have from doing computational physics in python.

I have used Blogmaker for most of the main elements on my site, but with a fair bit of hacking to make it do more of what I want. I also wrote a Typo-to-Django import utility, if anyone is interested. The URLs are slightly different, so I'm going to watch the 404s for a few days.