Over the weekend, I focused on the backend of this site. I decided to do something that I’ve heard a lot about in the last year.
Brent Simmons published an article just over a year ago that discussed the need for “baked” blogs, meaning blogs that are driven by static files. Fairly certain it was also covered in Dan’s conversation with Brent on The Daily Edition. Anyway, it was discussed heavily on 5by5 for a couple of weeks after that, and Marco was even inspired to write his own engine.
So I wrote my own. I wrote it in PHP, because that’s the only server-side language that is a) supported by my host and b) I can program in quickly. It took about 6 hours. It’s a single file, not including the template files and libraries like PHP Markdown and Smartypants.
This page is being partially powered by it right now. The blog module of this page is an HTML fragment file that was published on my machine using the engine, from a folder of markdown files. I then committed the changes to my repository, and the cron job on my server did the rest.
One sidenote: While I haven’t yet created a single post page template, the pages are getting published and uploaded, and the permalinks are incorporated into this homepage, though you shouldn’t expect much there yet. What I haven’t figured out yet is how the permalinks are going to work, given that they’ll be naturally different on my localhost vs the server. Lots of different solutions to that.
In the process of tweaking the fonts on here tonight and thinking about what kind of typeface I wanted to use, I accidentally got sucked into the wonderful world of text editor themes and monospaced fonts for about an hour or more. The end result, I’ve completely changed my coding font across all of my editors to Droid Sans Mono, I’ve switched to a Zenburn theme in Sublime Text 2, and I’ve created my own Xcode theme, based loosely on a combination of Zenburn and Dusk. I put it up on Github, so you can take a look for yourself.
Made the Unplayed module responsive. Hope to do this to the whole site eventually. From a design perspective, I’m drawing heavily on a blog design I did a long time ago, before responsive design was a thing.
I also put the site in version control, and set up a cron job to pull down the most recent version. Haven’t tested it yet, but if I’ve got this set up right, pushing this file up to the repository should cause it to show up on the site in a few minutes. If I set it up right. This is just a temporary solution until I can put some more sophisticated automation in place.
One of the purposes of this site is going to be to bring the content I create (or plan to create) on other sites into one place. Twitter, Tumblr, Dribbble, etc. I’ve always been really uncomfortable with leaving my content in someone else’s hands. So I’m going to centralize the content and surface it in one place.
So the homepage needs to be extremely modular. As such, I’ll need a strongly grid-based design, and a pretty flexible layout.
As a building block, I’m incorporating Unplayed, a single-page product developed by Shaun Inman to track games I’m playing, have played, stopped playing, etc. You can find it below.
Getting things setup. Got a little lost in Sublime Text 2’s plugin system, and accidentally learned a little Python.
For anyone interested (though it’s barely useful to anyone but me, here’s the plugin:
At the moment, this site is a single PHP file with a couple of includes. No backend whatsoever, which means I’m writing this directly in index.php as we speak.
The immediate plan is to build the backend of this site on static files. Not sure if they’ll be Markdown files or if I’ll just write my own HTML. More on that later.
I decided against using something like Wordpress because I’ve done that before, and I tend to spend all my time configuring and tweaking the thing, rather than writing or maintaining it. This is similar to my tendency to buy notebooks without ever actually writing in them. I have a ridiculous number of Moleskine notebooks with about 5 pages of content in them. It drives my wife crazy. But mostly, it drives me crazy.