This was a checking out webapps kind of weekend. Time travelling really has become easy now. Just don’t surf on the web for two years or so, and then try to catch up.

Lovely. Ten minutes install (I just followed the instructions, you need a free MySQL database and (probably) a recent version of PHP) and you get a very clean webbased content management system for blogs and various other usecases. The homepage is just two pages and yet tells all for getting started. There is also a forum and a wiki.

Nice. Twenty minutes install, same prerequisites as above. More feature fledged as Textpattern, the learning curve should be a little higher. Supports Pages (sites living outside of the ongoing blogentry stream), modularized Themes, Textile and Markdown, and tons of more features.

Rails

Awesome. Three hours for installing and building the first database backed webapplication. Based on everybody’s darling programming language Ruby, Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

If you are a psychologist, start specializing on dazed and confused J2EE / ASP / … developers now.