/me@(voip.)?|www./ SamLown.com

Its been a little over a two years since the last time I decided I didn’t like the way my website worked, and I’ve just gone and done it again.

One reason is that I’d fallen out with the design, the old was too “fussy” and I didn’t feel was easy to read. The new site is ultra-minimalist in contrast and allows for a few more subtle changes in the future.

The key reason for the change however is behind the scenes. Two years is a long time in computing and I’ve found myself learning lots of new and better techniques for development, including streamlining layouts with Blueprint and haml, keeping code as DRY as possible, RESTful controllers, learning how to really take advantage of jQuery, not including Javascript inside the views and controllers, using JSON whenever possible,.. the list goes on. I’ve also developed a pet hate for “admin” interfaces, those dreadfully ugly parts of a website designed to bombard the user with options and confuse as much as possible (I’m sure working with Vostok has had no small part in this.)

All this has lead me to develop my latest hobby project that I’m distributing as Open Source: Just Documents. I’ll blog about it in detail at a later date, but for the moment suffice to mention that its essentially a content management system that only understands documents. Everything is a document, a page is single document and a blog is document composed of documents. There is no “admin” section, and when logged in as an editor you can quickly edit and publish without leaving the page you’re looking at. Styling is handled through standard Ruby on Rails views, with a little addition for handling themes, so it can be easily used as a rapid development base for a new project.

I hope to work on Just Documents and this site during the next few months, and welcome anyone to leave their thoughts or try it out.