blogstrapping

Rewriting Blogstrapping (And Life)

A series of unfortunate events led to the need -- no, scratch that: the opportunity -- to completely rewrite the blogstrapping content management code in a wildly different style. As such, I have retired Lump (such as it was) and put something together using the cast-off leavings of another website I also rewrote recently (for much the same reasons). The resulting codebase for blogstrapping is now well on its way to becoming a generally usable content management system, lightweight and unpretentious apart from its Sinatra dependency, that I should "soon" have polished up to the point where I will make it available to the world as a Ruby gem.

What you see now is lacking a couple of bits of functionality that existed in the previous incarnation of Blogstrapping, but the core of the site still works as intended (and in some ways better). I'll tack the extra bits back onto it again, but in a more easily separable form so that you can pick and choose what you want to use very easily.

I fully expect there to one day be a worldwide market for about five users of the resulting code (much like IBM infamously predicted a worldwide market for five computers, but probably with a great deal more accuracy). The truth of the matter is that there is very little market for a lightweight, unpretentious content management system. The people who are technically astute enough to want such a thing typically build their own; those who just want to have something that works tend to use something Cthulhoid like WordPress, Orwellian like Blogger, or vampiric like whatever Microsoft and Oracle are trying to sell you for the low price of US$90,000,000.00 (plus one unbaptized child per year for the mandatory support and license maintenance fees).

Just about the time my new CMS reaches public release v2.0, I fully expect to rewrite the entire thing to look more like the illegitimate love child of a cryptocurrency blockchain and a distributed version control system as envisioned by the secular monks in Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem.

You probably think I'm kidding.

Let us not forget that it may come with front-end code written in PointyScript, an as-yet uninvented language that will either be implemented on top of JavaScript or distributed as some kind of (possibly browser-agnostic) extension. While I'm at it, I will solve the problems of traffic jams, methane pollution, and world hunger without having to kill anyone or do anything in particular with food.

. . . but first I need to figure out how to tweak my recipe for teriyaki glaze built from component molecules to make it perfect and find a way to wedge a rather large color laserjet into a space already overflowing with gear. Wish me luck.