Introduction
Everyone who dabbles in webdev at one point or another builds a dynamic blog
for themselves. I first experimented when I was younger with PHP/MySQL and
really enjoyed it. Eventually I was introduced into MVC based frameworks,
starting with iOS and Cocoa and eventually Django. While working on some
Django projects I realized how powerful these ideas really were through their
scalability and maintainability.
Overview
Design Goals
When designing a website normally you think outwardly about your potential users and what they will expect. But I took a different approach; the most invested and interested party in the site was actually myself, I wanted to focus on making my site user-friendly and fun for me.
I came up this list of design goals:
- Content could be completely and easily managed via shell
- Supports multimedia uploads easily
- Easy to move project between hosts
- Fast page loads
- Modern CSS3/HTML5 ideas - sorry IE users
- MVC Framework type backend
Design Ideas
After some experiments, I determined that Git would make an awesome content repo. Unlike the traditional SQL database approach, git is much easier to replicate/manage/move around. It also had all the core functionality of a good CMS built in:
- Each git branch could represent a category of content
- A tag could represent a quick link to any particular post I deemed important
- Each commit has an author, timestamp, and commit message representing a signature and title for the post
- Although commits represent a complete tree, Git has a built-in diff function that could be used easily calculate the changes (files added) between posts
- Using the mime-type identifier of the files added between posts, I could determine the files that can be safely displayed from multimedia
- GitPython could handle all the API calls I needed; which in turn is simple to integrate with a Django (my weapon of choice) app.
Results
Workflow
This is how I would add new 'post' to my website.
Which then allows the next visitor to see the post.
As for managing content, it is pretty easy as well. For instance, to remove
this unwanted post I can simply git reset --hard master~1 and then force push
my repo to my server.
