Yow, not another blog!
Set up my infogami weblog today -- it's one of the Y-Combinator startups. scruzia. And yet on ning, I still gotta learn PHP, and go collect all the others. None allow me to express things the way I want to, though. Colors. Too intertwined with all those other style issues, and still not all in a separate "colors" style sheet. And my wiki markup ... I suppose I ought to translate the Python version I did, to Ruby so I can fold it into one of the Ruby on Rails apps.
Speaking of which, wow. I had this simple (I thought) idea: bring up Ruby on Rails on my work system, and set up an internal site where there are eight or ten Rails apps running -- one from each of the open source rails apps showcased here. Sheesh! A few of them actually worked, most didn't. And my overwhelming reaction was that RoR emphasizes how easy it is to build your own RoR app ... but that it doesn't make it very easy at all to package up said app for export.
I really want to like Rails, since I like Ruby almost as much as I've liked Python for ten years. But my other beef with Rails has to do with database setup. IMHO, Rails doesn't scale down. Because it wants you to have a database system installed, set up, working ... you need to already be familiar with running mysql, postgresql, or some other similar heavyweight system. You can't just set up rails and try some things. Instead, you need to go through all this extra crap, to set up a system-wide database thingie, just to play around with a web app framework!
Ruby can read and write files ... why in heck isn't there a basic Ruby-based persistence mechanism that can fool Rails into thinking that it is the database system for Rails to interact with??? So I don't have to be super-user and choose and install some non-Ruby package, just to learn how to work with Rails?
10:23:44 PM
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