Just A Summary

Last year, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Typo was pretty much dead in the water as an ongoing project. Typosphere was a placeholder, changes were few and far between, the app was a bloated monster. So, people switched, in droves, to Mephisto the new, (and excellent) kid on the block. Heck, even Tobi, the original author of Typo, has switched.

Mephisto’s a great piece of software, and I’m as sure as I can be (without taking a closer look) that its underpinning code is cleaner than typo’s. When you’re developing on a rapidly moving platform like Ruby on Rails, there could be said to be a second mover advantage – the later you start, the more likely Rails is to already do what you want, and the less likely you are to zag where Rails later zigs.

However, Rick and Justin have other projects and demands on their time, and once something is Good Enough, it’s hard to summon up the motivation to make it better until you find something that you want your application to do.

So now, as Typo comes out of hibernation, it seems that Rick and Justin have been getting it in the neck because their project is ‘stalled’. Okay, so I admit, I did smile ruefully to myself when I read that.

Then I read the comments. Wow. Some people have some serious entitlement issues.

It’s been said before, it’ll be said again I’m sure: if you don’t like something about an open source project, “Patches welcome!”. If your patches are repeatedly rejected: it’s open source, fork off. If a project is moribund: offer to help.

Complaints just put people’s backs up.

I think it’s great that there’s choices available if you want a blog built Rails. Different perspectives on a problem space are important – if nothing else, everyone gets to steal from each other, everyone’s apps get better and everybody wins.