A couple of months ago that wretch Ben Poole introduced me to the joys of markdown (he is looking at octopress) I fell instantly in love with it. The fact that it was a simple format that I could edit on any machine with a text editor and I did not have to remember much in the way of formatting was a winner – being a bit slap dash I tend to make a lot of mistakes and while I compensate on clients’ work by double-checking everything, it can get in the way when all you want to do is write a quick blog entry.
I also did not want to use a system such as Squarespace even though that was what I set my dad up on and also what a lot of my colleagues use, because I love to roll my own and have the complete control over my content that only my own server will give. On that note, there are some things I do want to give up and stop paying for as I’m using amazon webservices so I’m being stingy on every cpu cycle and byte transferred, so search is out, I will use a custom google search (which I will enable once this new site has indexed), I’m also bored of content moderation (I get more spam than comments but don’t want to be an arse about forced logons for comments as I dont leave ANY comments when other people make me jump thought hoops) so I’m going to use disqus and I’m not hosting any files I can push to another server (such as jquery).
Finally there is connectivity. I write the vast majority of my blogs and stuff when I am offline (if I was online then I would be working) and I am sick to the high teeth with connection issues or having to have a special client to be able to write a blog entry. I just want to write it in a normal human readable text file which I can then just sync up to my server is just what I want.
Next blog entry: the nuts and bolts of the set-up on the platforms I have chosen statamic on an amazon web service box using Dropbox to handle the syncing and updates.
See you in a day or so.