brian hefele's untidy space

Edit - I accidentally postdated this, and as a result, the info didn't get out at the right time, and chronologically this makes no sense. I'm fixing it which means it'll show up in RSS again. Sorry!

I still have a major article brewing here, about a tragically disenfranchised people and the movie Wolf Man. But fortunately the specific film reference is unimportant at best, meaning I don't need to keep things current and topical. This is good because I have been working on two major projects right now. The first is a big, exciting design gig which will be posted to my portfolio upon completion (the end is near!). The second is a new brainaxle blog, which is live right now - the collapsible and the modular.

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I spend a lot of time in plaintext editors. Among other things, I write my poetry in Markdown syntax, I code occasionally (and block out DVD Studio Pro scripts), and I write these blog entries, built of much text and a handful of html tags. Depending on the task at hand, I'll work under the command line - aee, nano, or vim. Yet for some tasks, I simply want to sit in my cuddly Cocoa environment, and allow myself to fall pray to all its distractions.

So, for a long time, my weapon of choice was TextWrangler, the free text editor that anyone who's in the know installs as soon as they get a new Mac. TextWrangler has been my standby for as long as I've been a Mac user. Recently, I decided to try out some of the alternatives, however - three paid apps, and one free.

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I've been in the process of setting this webhole up for a while now. At first I figured I'd set up a complete CMS, but then early on, I decided a handful of other things:

• I only need a simple blog right now
• I only need minimal styling… Basically just needed it to end up looking sort of how it does now…
• I'd like something I can edit outside the browser

So at first, it seemed easy enough - WordPress or Movable Type. Using one of the big players means that I'd have no trouble finding a competent piece of editing software. I have WordPress installed on the master brainaxle site for our future blog, and I like it just fine. Yet that blog still isn't up, because it's a pretty powerful system. With that power comes a lot of customization, which is time consuming for me, as I'd rather spend more time with any of my other creative endeavors. Yet, I originally thought I'd install WordPress anyway, because it's pretty easy to handle.

Then something interesting happened - I read on Daring Fireball about the OpenMelody fork of Movable Type. The plan is for OpenMelody to burst into a complete CMS someday, which sounded nearly perfect for me - it would grow as my needs grew. I installed a prerelease of OM (which at that point was pretty much still just MT). I struggled with it for a long time, simply because it's even more flexible than WordPress. Trying to get everything in order, sculpted the way that I wanted, reminded me of playing with Drupal. Much can be done with it, but it takes time and patience. Time that I didn't feel like investing right now, and patience that I didn't have.

So, I dropped it.

I googled around for a lightweight blog platform. Lightweight was becoming a higher priority for two reasons - price restructuring with my hosting provider, and the simple fact that lightweight boils down to simplicity. I stumbled across Kukkaisvoima, which I still can't remember how to spell. I love it. It's lightweight - under 1mb. It's written in Python, which I don't have any particular allegiance or fondness for, but I do have more experience with it than PHP. Entries are simply plaintext files with a bit of HTML formatting splashed in. I'd rather use Markdown or Textile, but that's the least of my worries right now. The markup means I can easily edit it in TextWrangler or Nano without any fuss. So I installed Kukkaisvoima, hacked away at the CSS, hacked away at the core Python program, and three days later - here we are.

The big guns in the blog platform game are nice - they're somewhat heavy and complicated in order to suit as many needs as they can. Yet meeting too many needs leaves a big gap where simplicity is the primary need. Fortunately, for now, Kukkaisvoima seems to meet my simple needs.