After sending the last post around to a bunch of friends, I received a bunch of questions on my building of a lightweight CMS. The most frequent question I received was "why build something and not use something that already exists?"
Modern CMSs are Distracting and Awful
I've been doing this whole "content" thing professionally for the better part of 15+ years, which means I've spent the same amount of time dealing with cumbersome and unnecessarily convoluted deployments of Webflow, WordPress, Ghost (though it makes for an excellent alternative to Substack), Substack (which is filled with Nazis, though I help run my cousin's newsletter), Squarespace, DatoCMS, and a few others that I've thankfully purged from my memory. To write in these backends means missing a few steps (often something related to metadata) or working in an ugly and unfriendly WYSIWYG editor.
I wanted to write and publish within my existing workflow with few compromises. Right now, creating and publishing a post with Moonshake uses the following workflow:
- Write in Obsidian.
- Run npm run build in terminal
- Update a folder in Fastmail
To the casual reader, this may seem supremely convoluted, and that is certainly an argument that could be made (perhaps). Yet the writing — that is, brainstorming, creating, editing, more editing, more writing, more editing, and saving — is the most important part. As Obsidian makes the most sense for my process, I created Moonshake as a way to foreground this. The other two steps take exactly 7 seconds and, thanks to Obsidian Sync, can run on any computer where I use Obsidian.
WordPress is Particularly Awful Right Now
I still have nightmares of WordPress deployments at various companies over the last decade-plus, but the current nightmare is Automattic, who is [laying people off]https://www.404media.co/automattic-wordpress-p2-watermark-leakers/) after the CEO went absolutely mental against WPEngine. The company is not a safe or even great place to work, so why platform their CMS (which I suggest no one ever does again)?
Moonshake is a Great Song
I've been listening to a lot of Can and drinking a lot of coffee. Jaki Liebezeit — perhaps my favorite drummer of all time — has been on my brain quite a lot because his "monotonous" rhythms are rather infectious. I actually thought of the whole concept of Moonshake while simultaneously tapping out the rhythm to "Halleluhwah" on my desk in a moment of deep thought. It also just sounds kinda cool, I guess.
--
The last thing I want this blog to be is a blog about making blog-related software. Posts going forward will be more pertaining to the arts, cultural happenings, and things that matter to me in the moment. I will, however, discuss Moonshake if and when it sees upgrades in the future.
Until then, all I have to do is hit three keys and this ends up on the internet. What a thought!