Things Change

Over this trip, I was able to listen to some of the backlog of podcasts from 5by5, mainly the four episodes of Build and Analyze I had forgotten about from Dan Benjamin and Marco Arment. One of the topics that has been discussed over those past episodes has been that of self-hosted blogging platforms.

Marco was the lead developer of Tumblr and is currently the founder of Instapaper, a service I use daily. He’s been working on a project he calls Second Crack. It is, basically, a self-hosted blogging platform that transforms text files written in Markdown into blog posts. Cool stuff. Dan and Marco have talked quite a bit about the design ideas behind it, what Marco has been aiming for as far as post workflow, administrative workflow, how posts get where they are supposed to go, etc. and it is a lot of fun to hear about.

However, I want to write something myself because of it.

Also over the past few days, Andy Clarke has released 320 and up, a really cool inversion on what has traditionally been touted as responsive web design. What I mean by “cool inversion” is that instead of starting with the desktop and working your way down, you start with the stylesheet at the smallest device level (usually smart phone-sized) and work your way up to the desktop. The idea is to download only the needed assets and add stuff as you scale up.

It makes sense, it is cool, and I want to build something.

I’m also looking at forming an LLC again. I know, I just disbanded Replosion about a half-year ago, but things have changed (obviously) so I’m looking for names again.

All in all, a lot of work to do.

So here is what I am thinking at the moment:

• splitting http://bobmartens.net up
• http://bobmartens.net will be my personal portfolio site
• http://bobmartens.net/blog will be my personal blogging site
• both will be designed using 320 and up as the base
• http://bobmartens.net/blog will be using my own blogging platform
• my new blogging platform will NOT have comments
• it will use static files in the final form
• it will be simple

That’s the idea, at least. There is a lot of moving parts to get out of the way, but http://bobmartens.net will once again be changing. WordPress is too much for what I want, Tumblr is not hosted by me (which is not what I want or need).

Now I need to actually ship something.