Matthew Lang

A nice reminder that while places like Medium allow you to share your writing easily, you're still playing by someone else's rules.

The allure of other playgrounds, that already have lots of people using their jungle gym and interacting, is great. It’s hard (and far less fun) to play with your bouncy ball all by yourself. But if you want to ensure you’ve always got access to a bouncy ball and some killer monkey bars, you’ve got to be the one who owns them.

— Whose playground are you playing in? by Paul Jarvis

For about two years now I’ve been a user of the static blogging engine Jekyll. In that time I’ve enjoyed the simplicity of it. You generate your site offline and upload it when you’re ready to publish. For developers this is straight forward to do and but it also provides lots of possibilities for tweaking the publishing workflow. Jekyll has a library of supporting plugins that provide different behaviours and tweaks and allow content to be embedded more easily.

For all that Jekyll has though in terms of features, I’m struggling with it as a publishing tool and lately I’ve found it to be more of a block in the publishing process rather than a benefit. So, what to do?

For a while now I’ve been considering switching to a less developer focused blogging platform. A static web site generator like Jekyll is great performance wise but switching to a blogging engine that included a back-end CMS would provide more in terms of benefits.

Drafting and scheduling posts are two features that immediately spring to mind. I suppose there’s also the built-in editing of live posts that platforms like Wordpress and Ghost provide.

After trying out a number of blogging platforms over the last two weeks I’ve decided to switch to Ghost. Built-in Markdown support is a big factor in my decision to switch. With all of my posts in Markdown, porting everything over to Ghost should be fairly easy to do. Also it has just enough other features to cater to my other requirements. Tagging, code injection for JavaScript, themes and the ability to export my content should I ever decide to move again.

Lastly there’s the whole argument about your presence on the internet and the breaking of urls by moving to a new blogging platform. Well the solution is simple. The old site will continue to remain up and running for the foreseeable future while I port the content I need to the new site. This also allows me to start blogging again from a new domain. This site will now be my corner of the Internet from here on in. If you’re an RSS subscriber you start subscribing from here.

The new site also gives me another benefit. The chance to review a few of my previous post types. Fixie Friday will return to its weekly slot rather than being fortnightly. Link posts will also remain and will be limited to one or two per day. I’ve decided to discontinue the Snippet posts for the moment. If you’re looking to find out what I’m doing on a day to day basis then you can follow me on Twitter. Lastly my daily posts will become a weekly post rather than a daily post. Posting on a daily schedule was a challenge but it also forced me to sometimes publish less than ideal content.

I’m looking forward to moving my content over to Ghost and blogging again. I hope you’ve updated your RSS feeds to follow me at my new digs. Should be fun.

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I'm a freelance Web Developer from the UK.

I build high quality web application solutions using Ruby on Rails and Sinatra.

In my time I've built web applications with the following tools and libraries: Cucumber, Rspec, Minitest, jQuery, Postgres, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Heroku, Cloud66, Engine Yard and AWS.

When I'm not working I'm spending time with my family, cycling, golfing and the odd spot of gaming (yes, I've still got the skills).

If you're interested in working with me, you can send your details to me and I'll get back in touch as soon as possible.

Some of My Work

DailyMuse

DailyMuse is a daily email that you curate using your own quotes, lists, links and anything else you find interesting. One of these items is sent to you at random everyday. DailyMuse is built with Ruby on Rails and uses Stripe for payment processing.

Journalong

Journalong (retired) was a free service that takes your journal entries and saves them to your Dropbox. Journal entries are written in plain text with a preference for Markdown. It was initially built using Ruby on Rails. Since retiring this product I've put together a smaller Sinatra version that is designed to be run from your own computer.

Field Notes have joined the ranks of paper planners with their own take on a planner. I love the fact paper based tools like this are making a comeback.

via The Cramped