You Never Call, You Never Write
So, I missed last Friday's Fun Friday post. Technically I missed this week as well since it is now Sunday, and I'm pretending it's still Friday. I'm also not really doing a full “Fun Friday” post, just a bit of a status update because I know how you worry.
My apologies, but my family and I spent a week in the mountains of North Carolina.
The mountains around Sylva and Cullowhee hold a special place in my heart since it is where I grew up.
This was the first time we've spent more than a weekend there in nearly a decade.
It was quite nice to visit family including my neice and her daughter who were visiting from Dubai.
New Project Alert
I've been using Docpad for a few months now, and for the most part I love it.
Short summary: Docpad lets you write in Markdown and generate a static version of your blog or site that you can easily deploy. All processing happens at “compile” time, so users are just served up static HTML/CSS/JavaScript files. Super speedy for the user and highly scalable.
Docpad is written in JavaScript and runs in Node.
The one and only complaint I have is that when I'm writing and letting docpad “re-compile” the site, it can be a bit slow.
That's not enough of a problem for me to decide to write a replacement, but writing a replacement would be fun. As in Fun Friday, no?
Quirkety Blog
I've used the name Quirkety in the past for blog related work. I don't plan to make a general usage app that is all things to all people.
Instead I'm going to write an engine that meets my own personal quirky needs. Hence “Quirkety”.
My goals for this project are:
- Easier to set up than Docpad
- Faster “recompiles”
- Written in C#
- Use ASP MVC Razor engine for dynamic bits
- Run from commandline
- Gain experience with OWIN/Katana
- Move to ASP vNext when it matures a bit
To be clear I have nothing against Docpad. I love it.
My goal is to simplify. Where Docpad is almost 100% flexible in what it can do, Quirkety will be spectacularly inflexible.
Docpad has an amazing plug-in ecosystem that allows you to chain together transforms from darn near any format to darn near any other format.
Quirkety will be more opinionated. It will allow you to write in Markdown files then render them through the MVC Razor view engine out to static files.
Not sure how long it will take to reach the stage of replacing Docpad for my personal usage since I'll have to coordinate it with other things going on in my life.
Wish me luck!