I wanted to move my blog from Wordpress to a static blog engine ever since Brent Simmons blogged about baked weblogs. I played around with a few but when Ben Brooks wrote about staticDimension, I knew I had found my new blogging platform. The beauty of staticDimension is that it runs on a web server and doesn’t require me to bake the blog and then upload it to the web server, or deal with some Dropbox sync voodoo that I can’t do on my current host.
I really like staticDimension, but it was missing some little niceties that dynamic blog platforms like Wordpress have, like bookmarklets, auto-tweeting, easy mobile access and a nice looking environment.
Here is a list of things that I have changed:
- Changes in controlPanel CSS to use Skeleton
- Changes default template CSS to use Skeleton
- Added new tabs to the controlPanel, including “Rebuild”
- Change “Posts” to “Ideas”
- Modified default controlPanel index to show “Drafts”/”Ideas” is more prominent
- Added “?” to Posts on controlPanel that are a linked post for quick access
- Modified “New Idea” form to default to “Save” instead of publish
- Added “Writing UI” (Ugly as hell, but it works!)
- Created bookmarklet and “Quick Entry” page that takes page title, URL and selected text adding them to the form “Title”, “Link” and “Text” area.
- Created iOS copyable bookmarklet
- Created backup functions for articles, drafts and pages that downloads a zip of the plain text articles, drafts and pages folders
- Modified Second Crack’s “Post to Twitter” hook to work with staticDimension and it works like a charm
Of course, as soon as I make these changes, the develop reads about how PHP is simply a bad language (evidenced by the fact that I have been able change it), and it appears he is now re-writing it in Python…
