A perfect blog?
Everybody want to express themselves once in a while. Since the dawn of times man have expressed himself in different kind of medias. From the wallpaintings in a cave to a titanium cylinder sent in to space.
In between we have blogs on the internet.
A blog is a truncation of the expression weblog that saw its first light in the late 1990’s as the internet evolved and became more and more popular.
The internet is a perfect media for reaching people around the globe and getting response almost immediately.
But what is the perfect blog? and by this I mean the tools that is used.
It is easy to get started and write away, but for me it’s also a matter of how to do it.
The question is primarily: When you want to build something of your own, which tools do you want to use.
Among craftsmen there is a saying: If you get the right tools you are half done.
That also goes for blogs and blogsystems specifically.
I find myself getting distracted and thereby frustrated if things around me doesn’t works excactly as expected.
I know I can write and I can write a lot. But for me it has to be in a perfect environment otherwise the joy of writing is not there. I think many people feels the same way.
For me the perfect blog doesn’t exist, at least for now. The demands I have to a perfect blog are spread over several issues that are difficult to combine.
What do i not want
I do not want to write on facebook for several reasons. I dont have the need to make constant updates about everything I do. I dont like the facts that all news media around the world tends to look at facebook to find out what people cares about. It shouldn’t be that hard to find out!
I dont like the confusing layout and I definitely dont like commercials.
I do like the concept though that all the people in the world are connected in one platform, but I dont like the way it’s being abused.
Twitter is nice. But it doesn’t have the ability to write longform stories. I dont like the hashtag system and I dont like it’s superficial nature.
CMS systems like Drupal and joomla
They are nice but extremely bloated if my only wish is a nice and simple blog.
Free blogs like Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress.com etc.
These are free blogs, but even though it’s free as in free bear it always come with a cost. Your personal informations are given to third parties for an unknown price. Not in the form of telephone numbers, adresses and so on, but in the form of stastitics aimed for online commercials and the like.
I dont like that! All I want is to write, not to be a part of this insane commercial circus that are scattered all over the web and in the long term will destroy the free web as we know it.
Paid blogs like Squarespace, Movable type, Typepad etc.
I wont pay for a place on the web to make a blog. The disadvantage here is that you don’t own your writings and images. Yes you can save your writings on your computer and just upload the stuff, but still this doesn’t feel like the natural thing to do.
The writings on the internet should be free as in free speach.
You still dont have a guarantee for not being abused by the commercial industries.
So, if I want a secure and independent blogsystem I must host it myself.
What do I have
I have my own domain hosted at one.com.
One.com has a lot of nice features and I really like it.
On a one.com domain I have 4 ways to make a blog:
- Making a website
- Making a simple blog
- Making a one-click install of wordpress.org
- Making and configure a selfhosted blogsystem. I have an apache server and the latest php installed on my domain, ready to use.
Making a website is simple and nice and is done via a wysiwyg interface. It’s good if you have a small business and you want to make some kind of showcase. But this way you cant make a simple blog.
The blogsystem on one.com is simple, quick and easy. Here I can make some simple blogs, in fact I can have more than one. But there are basicly only 3 templates, in different variants that I can use. These templates are ugly as hell and there are no ways you can change the look and feel except some colors and fontsizes. There are no plugins to enhance the blogging experience. The blogs are not very mobile friendly, I must login on the normal webpage and upload pictures from here. In the mobile layout there are no way I can upload pictures from a mobile device because you can only use BBcodes to format your text.
The one-click install works like a charm. It is easy and fast to install and easy to configure. The problem with wordpress is that every time I open it I find myself looking for the right theme to install. I have spend hours and hours looking for the perfect theme to use and it’s a pain! Every theme out there have their flaws and benefits and still I havent found the theme that just have it all (I dont want to pay for a professional theme).
This brings me to the last option — Install and configure my own blogsystem.
What do I want
I want a simple system without all the bells and whistles that distracts me when i’m writing.
I am writing on a Macbook air and iPad air. The Mac devices just have the unique look and feel that makes it a joy to write.
To a start I need a decent editor to make my writings.
Editors
The perfect editor doesn’t exist either. Believe me i’ve tried them all. In Mac app store I have bought all the editors available from Scrivener to Smultron 4.
Only one editor meets (almost) all my requirements, that is Ulysses.
It has all the features I want, it takes backup and all my writings is accessible on all my devices via icloud. Ulysses makes me write and write and write! I think it’s all about look and feel and this one has it.
Number two on my list of preferred editors is IA writer. But the latest edition makes it impossible to change the extension to .md instead you are forced to use the .txt extension. This disqualify the editor in my opinion and that is a shame. The editor is nice to work with and its “nitty” font is awesome. But the good folks at Information Architects has a strange way to treat its customers. It’s their way or the highway, period!
Number three is Byword. I dont know what it is but it just dont have it. It’s a nice editor though and have all the necessary features available. But the look and feel just isn’t there.
What these editors have in common is that the input requires Markdown for formatting.
What is markdown anyway?
Markdown
The first time I stumpled upon Markdown was 10 years ago when I was looking at some readme files during a Debian Linux installation.
The readme files was just plain text and nothing more. Still I was able to see what was emphasized in the text by the way it was structured.
After some searching I found out that the readme files was formatted with markdown. My first thought was that it was beautiful and simple and easy for the eyes to read.
In fact, the essence of markdown is that a text/writing should only have a minimum of formatting that is the necessary to be understood.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Beside that it’s a conversion tool that can convert markdown formatted text to perfect rendered html.
So, with the editor in place, what blog systems out there could possible meet my expectations.
Alternatives
Static site generators
After trying both free and paid blogsystems and hosted/selfhosted CMS’ses etc. I’ve looked at some static site generators.
The concepts behind static site generators is just what I’m looking for.
It’s simple and you decides what the look and feel should be.
I’ve made some websites and forums myself over the years and dont mind nerding with some html and css codes to get the stuff up and running.
I’ve tried Jekyll and Grav and they didn’t make the cut either.
Jekyll works by generating the files locally and then deploy them with git commands. This is great but what if I want to write from my iPad? It’s not possible.
Grav is a nice system, but the concept of making a folder thats holds your post and your images and the fact that it’s the folders name that is the name of the post doesn’t appeal to me.
After looking at the codes in flat file cms’ses (which is the name for a databaseless blogsystem) at github.com I can see that these systems was the hot topic 3–4 years ago. Almost all of them havn’t been updated since then.
They also have some (or several) limitations in the way they are constructed which leads me to the following minimum requirements.
My minimum requirements for a blogsystem
The following are my minimum requirements for a blogsystem:
- Writings should be possible both from my iPad (IOS) and Macbook (MACOSX).
- The system and post should be deployed directly to my webserver with a minimum of efforts.
- When I’ve written something i should be able to upload the text and some images. If not via the editor itself then with FTP.
- The file extension must be .md.
- The files should go in one folder and not in a folder system holding both the file and images.
- The system must have categories and optionally tags.
- I dont want some header/frontmatter starting with — — (three dashes) it breaks my listing in Ulysses. The same goes with a header surrounded with comment tags like /* */ or <! — .
- The system should work online and not be generated locally and then uploaded (think iPad).
- I dont care about a administration backend.
- I dont care about a online editor.
- I dont care about a database (it shouldnt be necessary).
- I dont care about themes, I’ll make them myself.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a folder struture like this on my own domain:
/content
/images
/scr
index.html
post.html
.htaccess
/scr dir holds the necessary system files to make the whole thing run.
/content dir holds my post.
/images dir holds my images.
- The systems looks at the header with should just be the title of the post.
- The post in the content folder are listed by the files own date and not specified in the files header.
- Categories should be named in Ulysses own comment tag `%%` just below the files first heading.
- index.html and post.html are set up just the way I want with some twig tags or something similar to fetch the output.
- And the post should be published immediately, why shouldn’t it?
Every time I’ve uploaded some post and images, a refresh in the browser makes the new post appear.
Pure and simple.
Possible blog systems ?
It doesnt exist, period!
All the possible static site generators I’ve been looking at f.ex. on github.com havn’t been updated for several years. All other systems are way too overbloated and doesn’t meet the requirements as listed above.
What do i get
Well, recently I’ve discovered that Ulysses makes it possible to send blog post directly to medium.com. This could be a dealbreaker for me since medium.com is a very nice blogsystem. It simple, pure and a joy to look at. Soon The Soulmen will provide the same feature on the IOS for iPad as well.
A ordience is provided and its all for free. I dont know what deals they have with the commercial industry to make the whole thing running though, but until further notice this works for me.
I’ll stick with this until some better alternative appears.