It’s official. Not only will I be going back to Railsconf this year, but I just signed up blerb to be part of Chad’s Community Project Code-Drive. I’m excited about the potential of this blog engine and it should be pretty polished by the end of May.

So, if you’re coming to Railsconf, come hang out with us on tutorial day and help us finish it up.

That’s not the sound of silence you hear, it’s the blerb-ling of the future. I noted earlier that I was probably going to either get involved with one of the two merb blog initiatives (blerb or mrblog) or write my own. As it turns out, the smart folks at EngineYard who support us at Grockit are the same smart folks behind both. I’m now involved with helping develop blerb, and we are integrating the initial work that went into mrblog to consolidate the two.

It’s not a typo/mephisto/radiant replacement, and is not meant to compete with wordpress, blogger, or any other major blogging engine. The idea is that it will be small, incredibly fast, have everything you need for basic blogging, and be easy to extend by just adding new controllers and hacking away. Each of those other systems has their place, and I’ve used most of them, but what I really want is a blog that I can easily turn into an app. Most of the side projects I find myself building are some set of functionality surrounding blog-like communications. Blerb will be a dream-come-true for that scenario.

In the process, I’m working with some really smart people and learning a lot. For example, I learned last night that when you specify your datamapper relationships, you don’t need to add the foreign key, you get it for free. So, when you build your comments model, with it’s relationship to your post model, by specifying “belongs_to :post” in your comment model, you automatically get a post_id field. Ain’t that cool?

We are hoping to have blerb ready for public consumption before railsconf in Portland. If you want to know what’s going on before that, hang out with us on #blerb in irc (freenode) or check out github We also have a freshly minted mailing list