dcwr (don't care, won't read) This project aims to make your entire blog contained in a single file, of which you can do what ever you want via utilizing tools built in a community fashion. But not excluded to anyone who thinks that their propertiry softare that imports the file to make a sustainable and commodity for those seeking to build blogs. Skip To Getting Started
I feel like I don't speak just for myself but over the years maintaining a blog has been rather arduous. I hate setting them up, I suck at keeping them alive, I dislike buying into platforms, I cannot seem to back them up and they are always way more than I actually needed.
Just recently I happened to stumble upon a Hacker News comment by Jedberg where he also listed his pain points with personal blogging which largely mirroed my own gripes. His comment and seeing the other trends wishing to relive personal blogging era compelled me to attempt something.
Some readers might have realized already, but JSON Blog was inspired by another project that I started a few years ago called JSON Resume. Essentially your resume is defined as formatted data which you are free to take anywhere you want and use community built tooling to analyze, render and host.
JSON Blog is at core a schematic simply to describe a blog, and I've spent some time developing some initial tooling to make it rather seamless to get started. Here is a simple example (that generates this site)
{
"site": {
"title": "My Blog",
"description": "I write my thoughts here"
},
"basics": {
"name": "Thomas Davis"
},
"posts": [
{
"title": "Jean favaorite theme",
"source": "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/thomasdavis/3654cb08bf728f23a96bf70a037e5817/raw/dd38c0fb1094159789cc980e20f0544b664ed3c1/nobody.md"
},
],
"pages": [
{
"title": "About",
"source": "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/thomasdavis/3e7eed3648f3a3e3d7b9a84d99fa1da762c5b880/about.md"
},
]
}
As with any schema, you might say the naming conventions are terrible, and I'd agree. The reasoning behind any individual property might be rather complex so I can just tell you by what principles I chose these initial ones.
First, once you add anything to a schema, it cannot be removed without difficulty from the ecosystem. So I've only started with the bare essentials. There are some obvious additions to be made such as tags and categories but I've yet to define them for the second reason.
Schema's are only valubable in so far as person's will agree with them. (all reality is justconsensus anyway jks). And to that a schema is agreeable then you need to have a bunch of differing opinions. So there is a schema repo, where anyone can chime in and some people will be elevated to arbiters. And those who debate will complain about lack of change, can't blame them, but change should be slow. And I won't pretend, that Me, the programmatic surgeon dictator won't have a final say. All I can say on that is that I've been consistenly wrong and;
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak - Epictetus
The tools I've built are
getting started
generators
code example
Things I would like in a blogging platform:
- Generate lightweight static website
- Good clean default CSS so I don't have to mess with it
- Automatically upload website to CDN and trigger expirations as necessary.
- Self-hosted
- Runs on AWS Lambda or any other Function as a Service equivilient
- Has a super lightweight CMS that I can easily use on both desktop and mobile, so if I have ideas I can start writing anywhere, and can also make minor corrections to existing posts while on the go.
- The CMS can be a frontend to git, but git is hard to use on mobile, so I don't want the CMS to just be git.