Back on Ghost. I've been experimenting with using an iPad as my primary non-musical daily driver and blogging on Eleventy just isn't that practical. I need a web-based CMS. So... I guess here I am? Old URLs might not work, I'm working on a redirect thingy. How many times have I done this now?
Also, I'm on a base theme until I learn how to make themes. Ghost has changed a lot since the last time I used it.
A former coworker from the blog era was complaining about WordPress recently and it made me think of the bad old days, as WP was getting further and further from god's light, when I struggled more and more with it.
I don't like that, as a front-end developer (mostly in the "HTML and CSS" sense, too, not the front end we have today with JavaScript pulling all the weight of applications), I can't really make a WordPress theme. There are ways, such as Timber, to make that happen more easily, but that's yet another dependency and more weight added to an already heavy platform.
That's why I initially moved to Kirby. I think it's tempting when you've used something like Twig to want to have a templating language layer on top of things, but the truth is that Kirby (and Processwire, another CMS I've replaced WP sites with) is incredibly simple and doesn't require actual "PHP Coding." We're talking maybe a bit of logic now and again, but in general the functions are handled by an API that is pretty easy to use. Not to mention that both support the idea of defining your types of content, as opposed to having to bolt on yet more plugins to get custom content types and attributes to go with them.
The reason for all this adding on of functionality that resembles Legos a lot less than it looks like a technological shanty town is that WordPress was built for blogs. And yet!! Even running a simple blog is now handled more easily by other tools like Ghost.
So here I am, and it's been about a year and a half since I changed engines again, this time to the static generator Eleventy. One thing you really don't get out of the box with a static site generator is the CMS. But what you do get is your Markdown editor of choice. On Mac, that is of course still Byword, and on Linux it is currently the lovely Abricotine, but the repo was archived sometime in the fall so we'll see.
So how does it actually work?
Here are the requirements in terms of tools and platforms:
There are a few requirements on the computer side:
apt on Debian or homebrew on Mac)But once you install Node, all the other stuff that's needed is stored in the repository itself. Using the simplest boilerplate and reading the docs for a few minutes was all it took for me to make the simple Nunjucks templates required to make a site run efficiently. It could certainly do even more than a blog, but without a CMS interface I wouldn't give it to a freelance client or anything like that (which is where headless CMSes come in).
But for the marginally tech-inclined, it's pretty easy.
So what about actually writing?
Is any of this really easier than WordPress or Ghost or whatever? I dunno. It's free, I know that. It lets me write in a nice text or Markdown editor, which I honestly feel more than a web interface or tool like MarsEdit. I've been doing this kind of thing a long time. It makes me feel a bit like a wizard. Plus, it hearkens back to an older, more interesting version of the internet that I used to spend time on before it became the engine that powers the most destructive form of capitalism we've probably ever seen. I guess that counts for something.
Time to go write my next post in Vim.
I don't even know what that means. I think things have gotten over-complicated, but the idea that I can write on my computer and publish using a git commit is pretty cool. So that's what I'm doing now thanks to Netlify. The barrier to posting was "Do I want to do a merge with SFTP" and the answer is very often "nah." This is cooler, plus I can do it from multiple computers if I wanted to.
When moving site hosts to save a buck I seem to have screwed some things up. I'm not interested in paying for a new Kirby license so I'm trying a static site generator (Eleventy). Unfortunately, as much as I was able to do some bulk text conversion, I'm just not an expert at that stuff. For everything I love about Kirby, it unfortunately does not store all the page data in frontmatter like almost every other CMS or site generator. So it's been a bit of a pain.
The upshot: even compared to Kirby or Grav or whatever, this thing should be fast.
Been thinking about doing this ever since I did the last one. It never quite came out the way I wanted and frankly, the newspaper-ish feel just didn't work. It worked in my head, and it sorta-kinda worked in Figma, and it just didn't translate.
After reading about Utopia and thinking, hey maybe I should do that, I went a little deeper into the rabbit hole of simplicity.
Some notes:
rclone and editing live with GEdit (Atom couldn't browse and edit the remote files fast enough).I suppose I'll enjoy looking at this for a couple weeks and then off we go again, probably with a pendulum swing to complexity. Or maybe I'll just change that yellow to something else to tide me over for a bit.
I think I'm going to maybe do some blogging again? I've always had trouble with writing in the blog because I feel like it should be about UX. I generally want to write about synths and studio stuff. It is what it is. I'm now officially Too Old to be concerned whether potential employers look at my portfolio, see my blog, and realize that I don't spend every waking hour thinking about designing software. Also, I'm not really looking.
I've updated the type on the site. Maybe do a hard refresh if you're so inclined. I won't be getting to a redesign any time soon, but I wanted to make things a little more reasonable. Things are now set in Merriweather and Merriweather Sans, which I think are great little fonts.
I'm enjoying using Kirby to write my blog. It feels more connected to the rest of the site, more in my control, and more "not $5 a month to operate a separate virtual server running Node to have a Ghost blog." But the Kirby Panel, great for spot changes in your content, is not where you want to live every day for blogging. Fortunately, Kirby is a flat-file system that allows users to add content by simply uploading it. So now I'm blogging locally in my favorite Markdown editor and distraction-free writing tool, Byword. There are two parts to making this work.
The first half of the solution uses Automator, Mac OS X's super powerful and under-utilized workflow creator. I love it, although it's not always intuitive how to do what you need. Essentially this workflow:
article.txt (which is what Kirby needs to associate it with the "article" templateOnce I write the post, the second part comes into play.
Dropzone 3.5 was recently released, and it's a nice update to a super useful program. Imagine internet (not just web) bookmarks, file actions, and shortcuts, all rolled into one simple place. You can click actions or drag files and folders onto them, depending on what they are. So in order to publish a post, I just take the newly created folder and drag it onto an FTP shortcut I made in Dropzone. Bam, blogged. And I never have to write anything into another web interface again if I don't want to. Thanks to Kirby's self-contained content style, I can put any images for the post into that folder and they'll work as well.
As a bonus, I added the Automator action to Dropzone as well so I can both write and upload the post from Dropzone. It's a handy little tool that's a good buy at 5 bucks. Only downside I've encountered so far is that it can't upload folders to an S3 bucket.
A new blog again.
I briefly tried Octopress, a variation on Jekyll that generates a static-file blog. It's the bees knees in principle but I just can't make all the Ruby dependencies work. I've gotten into a lot of compiled web technologies lately; it's mostly Node-based stuff like LESS, Jade, etc., but this made me feel a little like an idiot. At the end of the day I'm a designer.
I'm really into the idea of Tumblr in some ways — namely speed, ease, and price — but the whole concept of being hosted by one of the big guys has started to get a little weird in the wake of Snowden, and I'm actually looking to do something a little more high-touch than just "Reblog this" and "click the bookmarklet here."
And now, the rise of cheap clouds like Digital Ocean have enabled a lot of flexibility for someone with some general tech knowledge (but not enough to use a Ruby-generated static site with Github for "blogging anywhere").
So I'm trying out Ghost.
WordPress is just not an option anymore, because it's an awful, heavy, security-hole-ridden mess that is fine for pushing on a client with a shared hosting environment but if you just wanna blog? not so much.
I do think my friends who watch my blog are pretty much limited to "the ones using Tumblr also", so I can't say whether moving away from it is a plus or not.
I'll probably make my own theme before too long, but I don't really know Handlebars and such, so right now this one's pretty nice.
At any rate... Off I go.