blogstrapping

Lump Interface Philosophy

One of the key characteristics of Lump at this time, and a characteristic I would like to maintain in the future, is a simplistic quality of its administration interface. No matter how slick the Web interface for the visitor might be, I want the administrative interface to require no more than two things:

  1. a text editor

  2. a file transfer tool

Neither of these requirements should be specific to Lump. At the time of this writing, the tools I use are:

  1. Vim

  2. OpenSSH

Writing a new entry for blogstrapping follows this process, as of this writing:

  1. Write it in Vim, using Markdown syntax so it is a human-readable, clear, basically plain-text file.

  2. Save it with a datestamp for its name (plus the .txt filename extension).

  3. Upload it with the scp utility, a part of the OpenSSH suite.

As for the Web interface for visitors, it should be simple to manage. At the time of this writing, it basically consists of two things as well:

  1. the RHTML template that makes up the main index.rhtml file that controls content structure

  2. a css file in the css directory that controls presentation

At present, all that appears here at blogstrapping is the main archive menu, headings, a footer, and Weblog entry content. Some menu-style detail should be added soon, in that blank right-hand margin area in the page design as of this writing. I have not decided on everything that will go there, but at least three things come to mind:

  1. a link or two that lead(s) to discussion (more on that in a later entry)

  2. a link to the BitBucket issue tracker for Lump

  3. a link to a contact page

At the moment, it seems that anything else is negotiable.