Yearly Archives: 2013
Oct 2, 2013 by Matt | Posted in Blogging, Featured
Ghost is a new blogging platform that aims to do one thing and do it well: blogging. Its developers want to recapture the spirit of blogging that was present in the earlier days, when it was all about writing and publishing long-form content. A return to the blog’s roots. Ghost has no complex content management features that add bloat, and no Tumblr-like microblogging tools that encourage the reposted image echo-chamber that Tumblr has become. Just a minimalist, distraction-free writing environment, where you write in Markdown, with a live preview. (It also features a slick dashboard that resembles a classier version of Windows 8’s Metro UI.)
Ghost is simultaneously an attempt to mesh blogging’s roots with the state of the art. Eschewing PHP, Ghost is a Node.js app built upon the Express framework. All of the blogs I’ve visited thus far that are running Ghost have been very speedy, a feat that is difficult to pull off with WordPress, in my experience.
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Sep 27
Maine has just joined the ever-growing list of states ineligible for the Amazon Associates affiliate program. The retail giant will shortly be terminating affiliate activity in the state, and sending out unpaid earnings to participants, in response to governor Paul LePage’s recent state tax…
Sep 25
For a project I’ve been working on, I wanted to to have my Sidekiq worker (which is part of an RSS crawler) discover the favicon for a web site and cache it for later display. It was fun figuring out a way to do…
Sep 18
Need to throw together a quick dashboard with live-updated information and statistical readouts? Dashing is a fun new framework built atop Sinatra that lets you quickly setup dashboards, much in the style of Microsoft’s “Metro” UI. You can leverage premade widgets (which include numerical…
Sep 11
If you have worked at all with Linux, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a package manager. Type a short command and instantly install software. Programming languages even have their own these days, for managing libraries. Ruby has RubyGems, Node has NPM, PHP…
Sep 4
One popular way to deploy a web application, or even a set of static HTML files in the case of Jekyll blogs, is to add a bare repository on your server with a post-receive hook that catches the files when they’re pushed and copies…
Aug 28
LESS has been a popular way to streamline your CSS-writing for a while now, but fitting it into your workflow isn’t always easy. Some designers use standalone applications like CodeKit or SimpLESS to compile their LESS files into browser-ready CSS, but I prefer a…
Aug 21
RandomUser is a new API that returns a JSON object with a randomly generated persona—complete with name, avatar and email address—for your testing purposes. The site suggests using it for design mockups, but the fact that it’s an API opens up plenty of possibilities…
Aug 14
On a whim, I decided to browse through GitHub’s Explore section recently. I don’t know whether users go there often or not (I certainly don’t), but there are some intriguing statistics there that tell a thing or two about what’s popular and who’s using…
Ghost is a new blogging platform that aims to do one thing and do it well: blogging. Its developers want to recapture the spirit of blogging that was present in the earlier days, when it was all about writing and publishing long-form content. A return to the blog’s roots. Ghost has no complex content management features that add bloat, and no Tumblr-like microblogging tools that encourage the reposted image echo-chamber that Tumblr has become. Just a minimalist, distraction-free writing environment, where you write in Markdown, with a live preview. (It also features a slick dashboard that resembles a classier version of Windows 8’s Metro UI.)
