The Codist

I need to refresh the technology behind this blog, but all the choices involve a lot of effort. Currently it's a LAMP site I wrote myself, previously it was various other versions in Java going back to even before 2006.

I've written it twice in nodejs already, but each time I got to a point where it didn't seem quite right. One used redis as a backend, and the other used the same database from the PhP version. The second time I made it responsive which wasn't hard but it's not all that exciting a design either.

Now I've tried using ghost, but none of the existing themes meets my needs, and learning the whole theme process itself means more stuff to learn and iterate on I may never use again. I don't do web stuff any more, so it's hard to get CSS design to do what I want it to. These days everything is more complex than it used to be. Most of the designs people do are focused on photos and virtually none make it easy to show off old posts. I don't need the former and the later is very important as people still read many of these. At least 10% of the time a visitor will read another older post; making them hard to find means I may as well delete them. There are 400 posts in this blog going back nine years. Some are dated, some are duds but there are still many posts people like to read.

So I don't know what to do yet.

Even building your own thing today is complicated, there are so many tools and frameworks people seem to think you should use, each with a deep learning curve and multiple ways to do everything which is impossible to evaluate without a lot of time. Choice is great until you get overwhelmed with choices.

I am an app developer, I need to focus my time on iOS and watchOS 2 and Swift and what changed in XCode and the latest betas. That's what people pay me to do. I really want to write (I have a lot of posts just waiting on changing up the blog tech) but I have to work on so many things I am not really in to in order to get there.

The current editor has some issues and needs to be updated, the current design is not responsive and 30% of the readers are on mobile devices, which is also increasing. Maybe the best choice is simply to update the current engine.

Lovely, yet another choice!