| I'm working on a little static site generator now for my own site. The PHP/SQL wordpress kind of option just annoys me and have held me back from publishing altogether (don't even get me started on publishing services and social media sites. Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational! My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days. Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-... Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already. Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future. Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people! This is such a deep issue. |
As for git. The reason these blogs are so heavy is because editing text files for most people requires a text editor interface on the http which in turn means you need dynamic content whicn in tern means you need a database which in tern means you need a way to submit this code so php which in t... and down the rabbit hole goes. If you get rid of the "editing files requires a text editor" part, then your site is easy and maintainable.
Git I think is a bit more programmer-focused of an api for random blogger joe, but a light wrapper might work. Maybe something like emailing a server with subject "POST: title of blog post" body "text for post" and having the server grab that data from the email, if it came from an allowed user, throwing it into the posts/ folder, git committing it and then deploying it to an apache server on itself. Actions like "delete", "edit" would just search for files with the exact name as in the subject and do the required git action on it.
Something like this could probably work. Email clients already have the text editor users want, why rebuild the wheel? If there was someway to wrap this all up without requiring users actually host their own entire email, I think it would be nice. I think teaching your mom git is a pipe dream unfortunately even if it would fix the Copy-of-Copy-of-Birthday-List_OLD2.txt problem.