Positive Reasons for Typo
Posted by Mathew Abonyi Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:11:00 GMT
I highly respect quick responses to a post. In Simeon’s post, he laments my lack of a positive reasoning for choosing Typo, so I’d like to quickly outline why I originally selected Typo and why I was drawn back to it.
Typo leverages the modern technologies that are out there and, true to a Rails application, has a love of shiny things without overdoing it. Nevertheless, it is fast (70 req/sec is my entire readership in a second, which makes me feel very warm and cuddly). Despite the speed, it’s not stripped down at all. What it comes with built-in (every social networking/bookmarking sidebar imaginable, multiple feed formats, multiple database support) is easily supplemented by its easy-to-use plugin architecture. It now uses the Rails plugin architecture, which makes it even easier. Adding themes is a doddle. Even editing the core code gives you the result you want, more often than not.
Basically, Typo is written to offer complex features using the simplest code. There are areas you could quibble with me on that score, and I may agree, but generally Typo is a sleek and sexy blogging engine with lots of features and yet which still has limitless potential. Just look at their Trac. The active development suggests a project which is going somewhere and getting there fast. I stopped using Typo after 4.0 and came back at 4.1. Already I see a lot of changes under the hood that would suggest more than just a minor version change. Even with all these changes, reverting back to Typo took me no less than 10 minutes. That says a lot to me.
Sure, WordPress and other blogging engines may have plugins or built-in features which rival those in Typo, but the sheer speed and flexibility of development behind Typo is peerless. I like that. It feels edgy.
I’m no old man and I don’t need Zimmerframe 2.2.1. Give me the bloody nose brawls, the midday groggy writer’s block, the street-vomiting hard nights, the raving ecstasy of Typo any day. She’s the kind of girl you can take out for a walk in the park or on a bruiser’s night and return home proud and glowingly post coital, because she’s always good fun, day or night.
Typo’s no dumb blonde.
Hey Matt,
I really appreciate your response to my response to… whatever :)
I have been debating typo and mephisto for a while and had just settled on typo yesterday morning before I read your post. I will admit I was actually coping out to writing why I chose typo by referencing why you did. What can I say, I am lazy!
But in the end I am very happy with the choice, I just wish I understood how to use it best. For instance, if I wanted to post and use your trackback url so you would know that I had, where is that in typo? Its the silly things that get me.
So I decided to actually google the trackback issue. Apparently typo is supposed (via setting in the admin) to ping any site you link out to. There by triggering the trackback. The problem is that the trackback url is not what I link to so I dont see how it is supposed to figure that out. Because I did link to your previous article, but it didnt not get credited as a trackback. So I still dont know how its supposed to work.