One of the things that has always frustrated me about blogging is coming up with a good visual design for the blog. Coming up with visual design that I like and has visual appeal has been difficult for me. However I had a bit of inspiration today and I did a little bit of design work in a graphics program that allowed me to express my initial vision fairly well. Now I just need to come up with the time and motivation to turn the graphic into a WordPress theme.

Well I decided to check out WordPress again.  I was using Mephisto  but it is really difficult to deal with and as a project it seems to be in a comma.  I had problems with Mephisto’s xmlrpc support and I even went to the effort of diving in and fixing some of the issues but no one seemed to care.  The patch I sent in wasn’t applied because someone else was going to rewrite the xmlrpc support for the next version.  So instead of applying a working patch to the current development version which is the version many people are running they decided to do nothing.  Needless to say I was a little peeved since if I updated my Mephisto install I would have to reapply my patch.  The pace of development on Mephisto was extremely slow.  The last stable release won’t run on Rails 2.  Mephisto is really geared to be used in a multi author environment and I only need a good single author solution.

So I am trying WordPress again.  WordPress 2.5 has a revamped admin section that is very Web 2.0 in design and is much easier to navigate.  I am giving WordPress another chance to win me over.