Apparently one year later the trend-setters can finally admit that flashiness is only cool when it doesn't require cleaning up every couple of days. I'm relieved and hope that this reduces the amount of sites I have to remember to revisit because the maintainer forgot his daily is-it-still-running check.

"Enter Mephisto", as the community likes to joke. A new Rails-based blogging engine/CMS that managed to breach the threshold and gain popularity in Rails circles. May I introduce its flashy demo site:

The Mephisto demo site, broken for at least 24 hours as of 2007-01-14.

After hearing about Mephisto for the first time (yesterday -- yeah I'm slow) I curiously sought for more information until I saw this, then stopped.

The award for the funniest comment on this story goes to a two-liner (from the blog search results page linked above, amidst a stunning plentitude of dissatisfied Typo users):

I was looking for the instructions to upgrade to Typo 4.0 (for my other blog). And my search for "upgrade typo" resulted in a link to Mephisto, which I have been wanting to try.

Oblig Pop

Happened to stumble upon Cristian Vogel's Last.fm user profile, and found it one of the most exciting treasures our community has to offer. Not only is he an avid user of the site, he uses his journal to publish stories of his life as a musician, his record label station 55 records, to tease us with intriguing technicalities of his production experiments, and much more.

Cristian Vogel also uploaded his upcoming, still unmastered Night of The Brain album "You and Yours", and went as far as allowing full-length previews for a limited time -- he just scaled it back to 30sec previews a couple of days ago, so sorry for posting this so late. It's quite an exciting album, may see a release in April. If the music industry was more like this I'd have less of a bad conscience when I'm spending money on CDs.

Am now eagerly awaiting a company blog to share this exciting bit of pop culture gorgeousness, and more -- just hope I manage this before Anil beats me to it. (As a web dev in our company he has early access...)