Hi. I’ve been watching Netflix for about… 5 months now. And I think I want to start doing something more productive in my spare time. *Cue blog-based montage*
The last few months seem to have gone by really quickly. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been watching Netflix all this time. This was mostly in an attempt to stay sane and really focus on keeping my mental health above water. And I think it’s going really well from that perspective thankfully.
And as things start to open up now that covid is on its way out at least in the UK, I’m beginning to feel much more hopeful for the future and motivated to think about it too. Oh, and spending more time with friends in person is a blessing that I will never again take for granted!
I’m moving in June so I’ve got to find a new place to live; probably another rental because the timeline for buying a place is likely too short (1.5 months).
I’m also keeping an eye out on https://matrix.org and how things are going over there, and it’s really cool to see everything that’s happening there.
I noticed that someone has finally implemented a matrix-based comment system for web pages https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments/cactus.chat that I thought would be a great alternative to my (sadly) abandoned project, journal.
As far as I can see (finding this hard to believe) but no one seems to be offering the matrix-powered “WordPress” CMS
- comment system package. And like… I really wanted journal to be this but I just never had the time for that.
I’m actually really pleased to have my own blog in the way I do currently, using the same tech that most in the same space would use. And I’m a huge fan of the “git push to deploy” mechanism I’ve got going, although it took a non-trivial bit of set up to get going last summer.
I wonder if there’s some kind of project resembling this that does full git-based CMS from the terminal. Probably millions right? But none based on matrix, I bet.
Imagine a world where you could:
- start a git server to track all of your projects as you deploy them
- control the server by pushing commits, which automatically deploys the changes
- edit + commit and push changes of local files with your
favourite editor
- potentially via some sort of GUI
It seems this kind of thing has been tried before but nothing seems to have taken off. I wonder if a component of this is the fact that CMSs depend a lot on the hosting provider and not everyone can be bothered to run their own thing.
The Hugo site lists a few of these on their site https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/
It seems likely that due to the nature of these, most devs would be more than happy to use their favourite editor + browser to preview things.
Conversely, non-devs are so unlikely to want to use anything that isn’t centralised that it doesn’t make sense to add an extra complication of a shiny UI-based editor to the dev-centric solutions. And maybe that’s why it’s never taken off.
Anyway this has been fun and I feel like making something matrix-y. I would love to revive the idea of blogs on matrix, I really feel like there’s a use-case there. Who knows, maybe the performance of Synapse has been improved enough to the point where hosting blog content in a room is really feasible.