Announcing PieCrust

You may have noticed that this blog has changed its look, and has migrated its comments to Disqus. You may also see at the bottom of the page something about some pie crust baking… here’s what’s happening.

I have a few websites around and most of them don’t have much in them (e.g. I use the domain name for other things). There’s clearly not enough content to use a proper CMS, but there’s a bit too much repetition for my tastes if I write HTML files by hand. Also, I wanted to take advantage of libraries like Markdown or SmartyPants to make my text look nice with no effort. Basically, I needed some micro-CMS that would handle some basic layout and formatting.

Then there was the issue of this blog. It was running with WordPress, which I’m very happy with usually, but it wasn’t geeky enough. Also, syntax highlighting for code snippets felt dirty and over-complicated. I stumbled upon the whole “static site generation” underground scene and figured I could find something in between: a micro-CMS (for my small sites) that could also bake its own contents into static HTML files (for this blog).

Enter PieCrust.

There was already a shitload of static website generators, but none that could also work as a “dynamic” micro-CMS. Also, I’m a programmer geek, so it’s kind of my duty to not be happy with existing solutions and write one myself (“this one uses curly braces, but I want to use brackets instead! Surely now I have to write my own!). Anyway, isn’t the whole point of home projects to write stuff for yourself, to learn something new or just have fun with a new subject, regardless of whether it’s productive? I was bored, too.

I ended up writing PieCrust in PHP not because I like PHP (it mostly sucks), but because it’s still the most widely used web application language out there. And also because I’ve already got other home projects aimed at having fun with Python and Ruby.

So there you have it, go check out PieCrust. The code is on BitBucket, and mirrored on GitHub.