I've been thinking a lot about what this site is really for, and whether or not I'm going to keep writing stuff to put up here. In the interim, I've been looking at the various options for managing the content here (and just saying that makes me cringe a little) and come to the conclusion that nothing I've tried is acceptable.

Perhaps a lot like my search for an email client that doesn't suck, I've had an extraordinary time finding a software solution to post things to my blog. I think I've found one, or rather abandoned the search to find one, but first a little history.

This site started as a project managed by RapidWeaver, a web design solution for OS X. It had its upsides, certainly. It is easy to use and creates nice-looking, functional websites that are very nearly always standards-compliant (but there's a way to break just about anything, and I usually find it). It also has many capable modules and available products and plugins that allow you to manage all sorts if different page types - storefronts, galleries, etc.

The principle drawback to it was that, since it's an OS X application, the only place I could update the site was at home, in front of my desk computer. There are several workarounds to this, the one I had chosen being a plugin called RapidBlog that essentially takes a Blogspot site and digests its content for use on a RapidWeaver site. You update Blogger and your site updates automatically.

It worked, but the resulting code was really, really ugly. I always wanted a better solution, and so I'd been looking. Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger itself, and Drupal were the products I tried. All of them, in one way or another, failed to meet my expectations, needs, or both.

In the meantime, HTML5 had become an usable standard, and every major browser had been updated to parse it correctly. Having decided I want to adhere to the new standard and noting that none of the mainline CMS products supported it (or successfully produced clean HTML code of any version) led me to my ultimate solution.

The grapefish.org blog is now produced from scratch in pure HTML5 markup, from templates and a 20-line shell script, with vi. It all validates, and more importantly to me, there isn't a single byte of code, either CSS or HTML, that isn't needed. The old page size, in bytes, was something like 5 times as much data. With as important as mobile computing has become to me and seemingly everyone else, staying small was a design goal that couldn't be met any other way.

I only wish my search for a decent email client was solvable with as simple a tool, but alas, that search continues. None of the clients I've evaluated over the last year are fully compatible with my workflow or requirements, but that's another story.