Note that while chimpdoc and tarzan are still up on GitHub, they're unmaintained. chimpdoc is no longer running the site: I've since migrated to Middleman, hosted by netlify.

Enough people have asked me about the software that runs my blog that I've finally thrown it up on github, along with a quick example Rails app which is almost, but not quite, what I run on heroku to power this site.

Comments, features and pull requests

I have very little incentive to add much to this that I don't use, but if you find it useful, I'm more than happy to receive pull requests. As I say in the docs, I'm not publishing this because I think it's groundbreaking, or because I want to show off amazing code. It's not the best code I've ever written (no tests!) but it works, and it encapsulates a simple idea:

CMS software sucks for managing content. You should be able to store your site's content wherever makes most sense to manage it, and have a simple layer that goes off, collects the content, and exposes it to your site via a consistent interface.

You want to store your articles on dropbox, so you can edit them in your favourite iPad editor? Go for it. You want to manage your photos on flickr? No problem: write an adapter and expose them via Chimpdoc::Gallery#feed.

Want to migrate to 500px or instagram? Just swap out the adapter and refresh the cache.

I think the idea of storing your content in places specifically tailored for that sort of content is a powerful idea, and one I wish I had more time to run with. If you think so too, I look forward to your pull requests.

Bonus update!

If you do decide to use Chimpdoc to power your site, I can't think of a better plan than to use Bootstrap coupled with this amazing theme.