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A lightweight CMS implementation for some lovely folks

I’ve been spending a bunch of time on the Host site recently and just wrote up some thoughts about working with Netlify CMS and GitHub Pages on SB-PH’s tucked-away blog.

TL;DR
Though it’s an unusual setup for a client site, I like the stack and would consider using it again for a similar project.

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Edit 23 Jan 2019
I just deployed some small fixes (force curly quotes via the smartify filter, prevent Cards from showing if no image), but the site doesn’t seem to be updating. It’s updated if I navigate to https://hostofleyton.com/index.html but not https://hostofleyton.com. Kind of weird. This StackOverflow thread seems useful, as does GitHub’s own troubleshooting page.

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My experience getting up and running with Homebase

I finally got round to exploring Homebase yesterday (jump straight to setup steps). My original intention was to get the SB-PH site on Dat + HTTPS à la this blog post by Tara Vancil. As far as I can tell though, without multi-writer support in Dat this setup would effectively lock Sam out of being able to quickly deploy changes. We’re interested in making that site a little bit more of a collaborative sandbox, so making deployment harder than it is currently is not the right step to take there.

So though I definitely want to get the SB-PH site on Dat eventually, we’re putting that on hold for now and I’m pivoting towards my site. In this blog’s earliest incarnation it was on Tumblr, and for a long while now has been a pretty standard WordPress site. The big task in moving to Dat, besides figuring out Homebase, is converting my site from WordPress to a static site via Jekyll/Hugo/Eleventy/GatsbyJS or something similar. It’s taking a while, I didn’t realise quite how much content has accumulated (1000+ tags?!) and there are a few WordPress-y features that I definitely want to build in (“more” tags, descriptions for tags+categories, proper pagination, etc.). More on that in a separate note.

So yesterday I put that aside and focused on getting Homebase up and running on a DigitalOcean droplet. Overall, setting up Homebase wasn’t too bad. The most involved part of the process was setting up the server. I kind of like tinkering with server stuff, so that’s cool. I 100% agree with the caveat at the top of the Homebase README, you should consider Homebase only if you’re comfortable with and interested in server administration. I would add that your interest should be *ongoing*. Servers take maintenance (related, see note on serverless setups). It’s your responsibility if a process stops running, or the software is out of date, or the Let’s Encrypt certificate doesn’t renew, etc. Hashbase looks like a great alternative for those that want the final result but don’t want to deal with the server configuration/maintenance.

The rest of this note is an outline of the steps I took to get Homebase working. Where good documentation exists elsewhere, I have linked to that instead of elaborating.

Read Homebase setup steps

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Link dump: P2P, serverless, sushi, etc.

Weekend activities resulted in an explosion of information that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. 💥 Link dump below for reference. Most of these are via Sam B, Gemma C, Hannah B, and agorama.

Going to write up more about serverless and P2P, and how they kind of intersect, once I’ve digested some of this.

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I’m on the bandwagon

Just published a privacy policy. The styles don’t really support multi-level headings right now, that will have to come later.

It’s probably overkill to have such a long privacy policy for a personal website, but it felt like a useful exercise. I like the fact that an essential part of GDPR is that these policies have to be readable and easy to understand. That makes them both a policy and an educational opportunity. A lot of people don’t really know why they need to be careful with their data or how to do that and honestly, that’s fair enough. Data privacy has been under-appreciated for a long time. If we talk about it enough though, and be patient with one another, that can improve.

There are downsides to the GDPR hullabaloo though… so many people are applying quick, artificial fixes. Pop-ups, spammy-looking emails saying “please re-register!” that themselves feel like spam… It all feels a little web 1.0 at the moment. There’s a real fine line between being considerate and useful vs being shouty and in the way of day-to-day life on the web. There’s no quick fix really, it takes time and care to look long and hard at this stuff.

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“manual until it hurts”

Over the weekend I had some good conversations with new friends about social media, how they use it, how they’re considering changing/continuing certain habits moving forward, etc. Off the back of that I’m (hopefully) going to progress a little further with syndicating these notes to selected channels. Probably just Twitter, really.

While looking in to that, I came across the phrase “manual until it hurts”. Hits the nail on the head.

Somewhat related: we just tore down our SB-PH site and replaced it with a holding page. I feel lighter already.

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Shopify theme dev notes, early 2018

We’re picking up a Shopify site that was put on hold for a little bit, and I’m pleasantly surprised by a few things I’ve come across. The pause might have been blessing in disguise for the site on the whole. The dev tools have progressed a bit during the hiatus, and I’ve come across a Sections workaround that might 🤞 give a little more content flexibility beyond the homepage.

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