Braindump May 2013

Not for the first time i’ve found myself stepping back from Twitter most of this month, and when I got drawn in, I got very frustrated with scatter-gun discussions – found myself trying to explain stuff I just can’t get over in a few characters, resulting in multiple replies especially when there are several people in the discussion, so even less room for content. As someone once said – having a discussion on twitter is like trying to have a conversation through a car window as you repeatedly fly past them.

One such discussion was about recommended Content Management Systems (CMS) – I was trying to explain what my holy grail would be – a dynamic CMS (as opposed to a static site generator such as Jekll), which allows editing of content as text or markdown files or via the web, where content can be synced and versioned using GIT, but also has a “throwaway” database for search e.g. it indexes content in the background but no need to keep restoring it when content is added to live but not dev/ vice versa. I struggled to get that out in a reasonable paragraph and i’m not really started yet!

Another area to deal with is comments – comments should really be counted as valuable content on a blog, so this content should also be stored as static files under version control (to allow it to be synced with other copies of the site, rather than the comments themselves needing versioning). The problem is that 90% of any comment system is anti-spam measures and moderation. Having spam comments committed to my GIT repository is downright dirty!

In other news, I’ve finished my current stint as a JavaScript contractor, and am going to be working full-time for the next month or so on the next phase of my company Olivewood Technology, which will be evolving this year.