A New Foundation

21 April 2010 – Austin, TX

So, first of all, allow me to say ‘Welcome!’ to all who may find themselves reading this. In some, small way that’s deserving of celebration, I think, as it’s certainly been a battle getting to this point.

The Fight

I have been struggling to find a proper CMS, whose features and function fit within the confines of my requirements for a CMS. There certainly are a great many blogging/content management platforms that are open-source, well-made, featuring great support and surrounded by a thriving community of users, developers and advocates. Wordpress, Expression Engine and even Tumblr have come to mind as possibilities, but none gave exactly the function or feel I felt was necessary.

I wanted my cake and to eat it too.

Requirements

With any given solution I wanted a set of basic features/functions, including but not limited to: easy theming, no DB pre-requisite, no admin section (publishing solely from text files written in Textile or Markdown) and easy publishing via something like Git.

After some searching, I began to see a slew of simple CMSes primarily in places like GitHub that offered most of what I was looking for, but nonetheless, not enough. In one instance, the deployment method was a bit obfuscated- no good. In other instances, the customization of layouts via themes was lacking or non-existent- once again, no good. I was starting to give consideration to just attempting to write what I needed myself. Anyone who knows me as an internet professional knows that I would have gotten it done and would have learned a lot in the process, but would have probably created a solution maybe a little amateurish or obtuse. I am not a programmer by trade- I am primarily a designer-, but that isn’t to say that I don’t have any concept of programming. I understand but lack the hands-on experience to create something of that nature from scratch in any time-effective manner.

And that’s not something easy for me to admit.

The Solution

Enter a two-part solution:

One of the CMSes I had been looking at on GitHub- Jekyll- was created by several people, including one of the founders of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner, and seemed to match most of what I was looking for in a CMS. However– me being me– I wanted to utilize GitHub as a point of contact in my deployment/publishing processes for redundancy, ease-of-use and simplicity. Then I discovered that GitHub Pages, a section of the GitHub site that allows you to publish a site or blog or whatever-have-you via GitHub, uses Jekyll as it’s ‘engine,’ and that several people were already experiencing the blogging bliss I so desired- including Tom Preston-Werner for his personal blog, tom.preston-werner.com.

Epilogue

I now write all posts in text files and then push those to GitHub for publishing. I’m currently exploring how I can quickly create custom layouts for posts in the vein of art-directed blogs/blogazines. (I just found this solution this morning, okay? Bare with me ;-) And finally, I now sit in my office, sipping my coffee, with a smile on my face from the victory in this most epic of battles.

A big ‘Thank you!’ goes to Tom Preston-Werner for his role as an entrepreneur and developer. Without his ingenuity both GitHub and Jekyll wouldn’t exist as we know them, and I wouldn’t have this solution to build upon.

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