It has been along time since I have posted anything to this blog. Life has been hectic lately.

In my spare time I have been working on the new design for this site (using grid960 , which I highly recommend) and rolling my own simple blog system (using Rails 2) which I deployed today.

I am also pushing myself a bit more as a freelance Ruby on Rails developer, so if anyone is interested just let me know .

I wanted something a bit simpler then Mephisto . I have great respect for the platform and it does a good job. But I feel that the code is quite complex. I also feel that some of the stuff is unnecessary in the admin interface. For example if I want to change the theme, I don’t want to change it using the admin pages, I want to change the file by hand. I also do not want to use Liquid as the templating language (I know you can change that though). I also do not want to have the options to set posts to use Textile or Markdown or plain html. I feel that it should not give these options, just make a decision and stick with it . I also have a few more problems with it, but I don’t want to take away from the great job it is currently doing.

So I made a back to basics blog system (it seems to be all the rage now) called dead-simple-blog for people who know there way around a rails app. I have tried to keep the code and features as light as possible. That way anyone can change the code as they see fit.

I will be realising it soon (2-3 weeks) on github, if anyone is interested. I just need to sort out a few things first, and test it in the wild.

Hopefully this will lead to more blogging in the future. I sure hope so!

Hamza