My Fantasy Web Thingy
I know the term ‘thingy’ isn’t exactly technical, but I use it to avoid premature specification, and especially to avoid the ‘framework vs library’ debate.
I am not completely happy with the way I run my website: the tools I’m using do not quite fit my preferred usage. Currently I’m using Wordpress for my blog, and rest2web for everything else.
So, what’s up?
1. Using two completely different tools feels very wrong. Effectively, I’m running two completely separate websites that happen to be at the same address. They look different, posting to them is different, backing them up is different.
2. Wordpress
- Posting to Wordpress has to be down from a browser, using their editor.
- it has to be done in Wordpress markup (I did find a rest2web plugin, but I haven’t been able to get it to work).
- Pasting (and reformatting) prepared text from My Favourite Text Editor is a real drag.
- Even the mildest customisation of Wordpress (i.e., changing the theme) requires me to wade through lots of horrible php, html and css.
What’s wrong with that?
php. me no like.
Can you be a bit more articulate, or is this just sectarianism?
Wordpress consists of about 37500 lines of code in 147 php scripts. Here’s a histogram (click for full-sized image).
Each script seems to be either a long list of functions, and/or a lot of mixed up php code and html. I tend to write code like this when I’m either in a hurry or slightly out of my depth. The result tends to be buggy and hard to maintain, and I either bin it or rewrite it as soon as possible. I do not find this reassuring.
- In fairness, I should say that Wordpress is very easy to set up and manage.
3. Rest2web
Rest2web allows me to work more or less how I want to (see below). But (a) not quite, and (b) it doesn’t do blogs.
In an ideal world …
… I would dictate my thoughts to an amanuensis, while strolling around my vast sunny orchard …
Failing that, I want to write my web pages and blog entries in my favourite text editor, in my favourite markup language (reStructuredText), hit some key and everything gets uploaded to the website.
As I said, rest2web is almost there. So where does it fall short?
- I am too lazy for rst-style headings, so I use emacs outline format headings (’*’ = heading1, ‘**’= heading2, etc.). I have to preprocess the pages into proper rst before I can use rest2web.
- I can’t upload immediately, I have to convert the rst to html first and then upload. Actually this is a feature, as it forces me to check (and inevitably correct) my work before I upload.
- At the moment I actually upload everything into a subversion repository and then manually export the html tree. It would be good if this export could be done automatically on each check-in. I could probably do this with a post-commit hook script.
- rest2web doesn’t do blogs. This chap seems to be running a blog on rest2web, but I note he says it was a ‘huge hack‘.
What next?
It seems my options are (in reverse order of preference):
- Carry on as I am. I will remain mildly dissatisfied and it will all bubble up again in a few months.
- Extend rest2web to support blogging. This could be a big time sink.
- Get a Wordpress reStructuredText plugin working. This would probably be a small time sink.
- Find a blog engine which is closer to my requirements. This could be a big time sink. I’ll do a preliminary survey and try to weigh up switching blog engine versus option (3) above.
Oh, and don’t forget to write that subversion post-commit script!