Cleaning up

Two things I learned about myself since I started maintaining a blog. One, I don’t have much to say. Two, my interest in photography is declining day by day. These were evident by looking at the dates of posts on the homepage. The last article was posted a year ago.

The old and stinking stuff is always at home page. That didn’t motivate me to write more posts. It just motivated me to do a cleanup. So I moved all stale items to the back rooms and kept a short information about me on the front.

Machinery

Up until now, I was using Wordpress to maintain my website. Last week I gathered some courage and threw the Wordpress out of the window. It’s time for flat files.

I tried a couple of flat file CMSes: Stacey App (PHP), Jekyll (Ruby) and Wintersmith (Node.js).

Stacey App is more of a content management system, where as Jekyll and Wintersmith are just static site generators. You keep your content as text files, Jekyll or Wintersmith can generate HTML files which can be hosted on any servers.

One important criteria on selection of the CMS was that, I should be able to group the contents of an article and its related assets (images, javascript or PDFs) together in a folder. Stacey in it’s documentation says you can do this but never worked for me. Even though I liked its ease of setting-up, I decided against it because of the same folder for content and asset issue. The same was the situation with Jekyll, you have to keep the article assets in a common place. If anyone looking for a flat file CMS and don’t mind keeping the assets in a common folder, Stacey App is a good choice.

Wintersmith handles the content and asset grouping very well. The core concept of Wintersmith is ContentTree, a nested object of all the files. The framework just gives you the content tree within its jade templating engine. We have to manually do the selection and sorting of the articles with help of underscore.js. This flexibility with Javascript and article-assets grouping made me choose Wintersmith.

Once the HTML files are generated, I push the pages to the web server using GIT.