My old site wasn’t any good for writing. WordPress got in the way and hindered me getting my words down onto the page. Its version of the TinyMCE (visual editor) often made a meal of my intended markup. I really just wanted to write Markdown from an unobtrusive admin interface.

I tried searching for a solution that was simpler and could also have some creative control over. Ultimately, I decided the only way to truly get what I wanted was to create my own lightweight CMS.

My decision to build this site on Rails was really to scratch an itch I’d had for a while. What was the minimum viable amount of code I could write to get the job done? All I wanted in my database was my blog posts and session data, so they’d be portable for future iterations. I wanted the back-end to be simple and clutter free. I essentially wanted to do less, but better.

The design and front-end are very lean (there’s just under 120 lines of CSS and 15kb of JavaScript). I’ve gone all out on making it responsive from both a development and design perspective. The front-end performance has been one of my primary focusses.

So, a week in the making and here it is. Moving forward, I’ll be tweaking, realigning, as well as writing about the build process.