“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)
The problem
If there’s one thing that the internet doesn’t have a shortage of, it’s blogging software. It seems that almost every web programmer’s first project is writing their very own blogging engine. Indeed, a certain frameworks initial claim to fame was how easy it was to create a weblog, in just 15 minutes!
Most of these engines don’t survive very long. They rarely get used by anyone other than the initial author, and even then they’re usually abandoned and replaced with a fully-featured engine, like Wordpress, Typo or Moveable Type. And then you have all those features, that you didn’t have to write yourself, and you can add all the widgets you want to your blog. Everybody should see from what corner of the earth your visitors come from. Everybody should see what you recently wrote on Twitter. Everybody should see what blogs you read.
I don’t.
The backstory
Back when I discovered Ryan Tomayko’s Blog, one of the things that I really liked about it (besides the content of course) was the simplicity of the blog itself. It was plain, elegant. If I ever had a blog, I said to myself, that’s what I want it to look like.
So I was very happy when he open sourced the source code that powered his site, under the name wink. There was, of course, a small catch: Wink didn’t really run anywhere else, since it was written to exactly fit Ryan’s needs. Luckily, Chris Schneider started working on it as well, and after a while, wink was in a state where you could actually use it yourself with a little bit of work.
Since I’m currently bound to Apache for anything web related, I tried to deploy wink with passenger – which, of course, failed. Demoralized and immediately distracted by something shiny, I gave up, only to return every now and then and make another attempt at getting it to play nice with passenger.
In the meantime Ryan had FAILed wink, because either he believed or someone told him that the world didn’t need another blogging engine. I didn’t agree, un-FAILed wink, and continued to try to get wink running under passenger.
The now
Today, I got wink running under passenger (So much for being lazy). That is great news, mostly for me, but still. And I love it.
I don’t have any grand plans for wink itself, since it is pretty much what I want. So I’ll just try and get it more stable, remove some of the sharp corners, clean the code, and maybe make it easier to deploy wink.
I’m not going to add new features to Wink. Wink doesn’t need them, and I don’t want them. If you need them, there’s other software out there that already supports them. Use that. Wink is going to stay lean and mean. Just you and your writings.
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