Along these lines, I had built up my site using makefiles, imagemagick, and a little perl (to translate multimarkdown to HTML). Super simple, super lightweight.
Never really understood why site generation needed custom tools, on demand page generation, databases, etc for what amounts to the web equivalent of a mail merge.
As someone who has programmed in both, I don't agree. Ruby is a lot more fun than programming in shell. I would recommend learning shell programming as well though.
However, I'm very new to web development, and I went with what I'm learning.
Also, I wanted to build something that other people like me (who aren't necessarily web people) could use without having to think about it too hard. Heroku's deployment strategy (i.e., "git push heroku master") makes the whole thing dead simple.
There is this a kind of "elitism" that pushes people to think that blogs are just chunks of text. This might be true in I.T but a lot of bloggers need ways to style and insert rich interactions in order to better tell their story.
That's absolutely true! hypertextual isn't a one-size-fits all thing, by any means; for me, it's about building what I need - no more and no less - and then getting to use what I've built.
If someone else uses it, I'll be excited! If nobody else ever uses it, I'll still be excited - because as simple as it is, it's something that I can use, and enjoy using.
And to be fair - Markdown is pretty damn expressive... you just have to roll your own expression if you want anything beyond the basics. But again - it's about only using what I need, and about getting to use what I've built.
No idea. I don't know what Jekyll is; I'm not really a web developer and I'm in the early stages of learning Rails.
I read that talk by Maciej Ceglowski and it made me really want to build something of my own, so I did.
There are probably other solutions out there that do the same thing, but I really wanted to roll up my sleeves, write something, and fling it out into the ether to see what happened.
You might find Jekyll and similar stuff interesting - basically, software for building fully static websites from a similar starting point. I don't know that it's strictly necessary, as the real problem is front-end bulk.
But yes, diving in and making something that works is a good impulse.
Great response. Too many people criticize someone's work comparing it to similar stuff that's been around since just before the dinosaurs went extinct with responses like "what makes yours better?"
It doesn't. It's just something you made. Use it or not. Nobody cares.
