I recent wrote about why I started this blog and so as a companion piece, I have decided to write a little bit about the how.

Originally I had planned to re-write this site using WordPress as that would fairly easily give me some basic pages and a simple blog and it would be pretty simple to extend as required. However, since then, I have actually had the misfortune to work with WordPress on a couple of sites and have not enjoyed the experience. I don’t understand the admin panel layout, I hate the complete lack of tracking of changes and I don’t particularly like the way it seems to take over a server. And more than anything, I don’t like that it’s PHP (I really don’t like PHP).

However, I recently came across Stacey and was very impressed. I decided straight away that I didn’t want to use Stacey itself as it too runs on PHP but the idea of a blogging system that is entirely built from text files with no database or admin screens really appealed. It reminded me that I’d seen something similar written in Ruby — better still Rack — and using Git to control changes.

A lot of digging (and plenty of scouring) later I re-discovered toto which seemed to tick every box I had: text-file-based, hosted on git, written in Ruby and very simple to set up and deploy. Perfect.

The only issue I had was that it is only a blog and not a more customisable CMS however, as both the toto blogging engine and Dorothy, the templating system that forms the structure of the site itself are Open-Source (both hosted on GitHub) I knew that I could easily make the required changes to tailor it to my needs.

As it turned out, a very simple tweak to the templates allowed me to distinguish between a blog post and a project page which is all the tweaking I need so far.

The system is aimed at technical people who are happy to update their blog using the command line and a text editor rather than those who want to be able to post straight from their browser but the control this approach gives me in updating the content and structure of the site far outweighs the disadvantage of not being able to update from my phone.

My only concern is the ability to expand the site beyond the very simple but for now, I couldn’t be happier with it.