Matthew Lang

When I decided to host my own blog, I honestly didn’t think I would get this far in building a tool that allows me to publish through the browser. I’ve tried a couple of times before with different approaches, but each time I failed to get something I liked.

Now, I’m having a lot of fun building one for my Jekyll blog. It was initially called PostPress, but over the weekend, I renamed it to Wren. I’ve always liked the old Twitter bird as a symbol for publishing, and we’ve had a lot of small birds like these in the garden this year. Along with the rename, I also gave it a fresh look.

Built using Ruby on Rails, this little application has gradually evolved into quite a capable publishing tool.

Over the last eight months, I’ve been able to include the following features:

• Compose drafts
• Publish drafts as posts
• Manage the categories of my blog
• Manage my book collection on my reading page
• Upload images and include them in posts
• Upload images to my /photo page
• Post links to my link blog
• Run an audit on my blog to check for missing alt text and broken links
• Update pages such as my now and about pages

Over the winter, I hope to add the ability to update existing posts, which will be quite a task in itself. I also plan to keep adding little tweaks and features as I need them.

These changes to how I blog have let me post a bit more often over the last few months, and I hope that continues into the new year.