Adventures in blogging 📝
Motivation
I like the idea of shared learning and working together as a team, in a way that's portable across employers.
Prakhar pointed me at Nathan Marz's post on blogging, which provides excellent motivation specific to blogging.
Megha shared her experience at Write/Speak/Code, which recommends professional writing as an essential aspect of career development. (Write/Speak/Code also brought Open Source Misfeasance to my awareness 👍 esp the slide "open source is like being an adult - it seems magical until you realize nobody knows what the hell they're doing." :)
I'm inspired by the meta-knowledge community on Github.
Approach
Platform
I like Github pages for a couple reasons:
- Jekyll provides all the functionality I need
- The content I produce is portable and by anyone
Discovery
Github Pages are conceptually simple in part because functionality is constrained on the server-side.
Ideally, I could provide full text search, but doing so without a server requires either a heavy client or an external vendor. External vendors with free offerings usually want UI control as compensation and I'd prefer full control.
With this set of constraints, and given I only have a little content, a simple regex filter seems appropriate.
I sort content by last modified and enable filtration by date.
Content management
I use Forestry as a CMS in front of Github Pages to simplify content capture.
Pros
- Nice editor and preview
- Nice error logging and docs
- Relatively easy date maintenance (delete and let it auto-populate), for the sorting mentioned above
- Stable business model
Cons
- Editor feels cramped, eg toggle-able "focus" mode would be nice
Tips
- Use Github-style code fencing rather than Jekyll highlight tags
Alternatives
- Siteleaf is good, but doesn't provide preview in free mode, and renames files according to date front-matter (after import)
- I tried Prose.io in the past, but saving content was flaky
- I plan to revisit jekyll-admin if/when it's supported by Github Pages