Publishing a Half Serious Blog
It's been a while since I unleashed the nerdy side of my brain on this blog.
I transferred the domain name and hosting for my homepage (I ownmy own name as a dot com)to a new host a couple of days ago, with the intention of installing WordPress, and putting more effort into “semi-professional” poststhe ones about technology, the internet, software development, and so on. All the nerdy stuff I don't typically post here. Somewhere along the way the purchase of hosting went a bit wrong, and it turns out I can't have a database until it is sorted outwhich means no WordPress. It got me thinkingabout if I needed a database.
I ended up looking at the “Kirby” file based content management system. Unlike WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Ghost, TextPattern, or any of the other popular publishing platforms, it requires no databaseyou just upload markdown formatted files, and they appear in the website as formatted pages.
I'm not sure if I like it or not. The text files follow a number of conventions that I know I would forgetso I would end up breaking the site all the time. I guess half my problem with any system is that I'm a web developer, so I can see how I would have built something. A platform has to be pretty impressive before I stop thinking that, and just use it.
The most impressive feature I have seen in any publishing platform over the last few years has been the markdown editor in Ghost that shows a live preview of the rendered HTML as you write. The problem with Ghost is that it's only at version 0.4(ish), and has lots of missing functionalitythings you take for granted elsewhere. Being able to find an old post in the admin interface is a pretty good example.
So I'm sitting on my hands, waiting for the hosting problems to be sorted out before installing my own copy of WordPress, and migrating across all manner of posts about nothing of earth shattering importance. I'm not good at sitting on my handsI tend to start tinkering with other stuff.