BakedPotato - An attempt at Baked Blogging

I have been vocal in the past about my feelings on Drupal and other Blogging/CMS platforms. It’s not they are inherently “bad”, just difficult to work with. They tend to become complex as they mature, making it harder to work in the code and set it up the way I want. I’ve considered writing my own blogging system before, but it becomes daunting when you start considering everything that goes into a a PHP based blogging engine that uses a MYSQL database as content storage. So why not just go back to static files?

That's right, cut out the database. Cut out the PHP scripts that generate the pages per request. Simply make a website using html files. A friend of mine (Krhanios) already does this, but he links to other sites that have the dynamic content. What I’m going to attempt is building all the static files dynamically in the background when I make a post. It solves a lot of problems inherent to PHP/MYSQL based sites. it does introduce some problems of its own, but nothing very complex. Part of the fun is figuring that all out, Right?

I by no means take any credit for this idea. I actually heard about it on Build and Analyze Episode 18 where they discussed ”A plea for baked weblogs”. I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about it and I simply love the idea and want to play with it. So did Marco Arment , he has been working on his own version called Second Crack. It sounds great and I cant wait to see it, but he has not open sourced it yet. So what I’m going to play around with my own version I have dubbed “Baked Potato”.

This is going to sound odd, but I don't ever intend for Baked Potato to be finished. Its really just a way for me to play with the idea until Second Crack gets open sourced. You can watch me (or even help if your interested) play around with Baked Potato on GitHub. You can check it out here: Baked Potato on GitHub. Nothing will be there yet, but hopefully the first Proof of concepts will be posted. The first proof of concept is geting a file generator together and do conversion from Markdown Syntax to a complete HTML document. My plan is to have it by next week!