After years of blogging over my own Wordpress and working with fantastic themes such as Hybrid, I decided to port my blog to Sinatra. The reason behind this move is that I'm not happy anymore with the amount of markup and styling generated by Wordpress. It's not bad, but at this point is not for me.
Considering that now I would tweak my site directly from the source, and because I use a git workflow, I decided to keep the contents in the source code as well. I know, I know, that's what databases were designed for. However, I feel that it's cleaner and simpler to keep it this way. As I'm using git, now I also have the advantage of having my content versioned as a default.
From the authoring perspective, I feel Markdown is the way to go. I'm tired of all those WYSIWYG menus and options. As a designer, I want to keep it simple and Markdown forces me to do this. It's also easier to write in Write Room and just copy the plain text to Textmate.
For those of you wondering what about advanced blogging features such as paging, cross-referencing, tagging, related posts and categories, here is my take. I feel blogging is evolving and such mechanisms belong somewhere else. Perhaps because I think about my blog as a crafted collection of short essays, I don't care about fancy navigation styles. What I care about is content and order.
This piece of Sinatra + Markdown (with templating support of HAML and SASS) is what I feel will bring my writing back to life. Let's see if such thing happens.
Copyright (c) 2012 César Salazar
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