Concepts of Blogless

What are the implementation concepts of Blogless?

Apart from a handful of basic settings, like your website URL, your name, your web profile and Twitter ID and a decision, if you want to get an automatically updated sitemap or RSS feed, all other data is stored just in the generated HTML files. So there is no source, no ugly text files from which pages are generated, no wiki or markdown syntax to learn, no nothing. Just concentrate on writing your articles with the widely used online HTML editor tinymce. If you want to concentrate even more on your article, you can switch the editor to fullscreen.

HTML is all we need

HTML is the web's standard format for content and there is no need to have a second source for these in another format, which needs to be first converted to HTML and brings it's own limitations with it. Indeed, you can use any HTML editor to edit your files, if you don't want to do this online. And you can use any feature HTML and CSS brings with it.

Concentrate on articles

On the other hand Blogless concentrates on writing articles, it is no static website generator. It is made for people, who want to write articles, want to have their own domain and don't want to store their content in esotheric text formats.

Generate static content whenever possible

It is even possible to drive the PHP stack on your notebook and just upload the generated HTML to your webserver, if you don't want to write your articles online, have no webspace with PHP or if you are extremely sensitive about your site's security. Or if you would like to upload your files to other content distribution systems, which do not have PHP on board.

Meta information but out of your way

Blogless hides some meta information in the generated HTML, like the authors name, profile, twitter id and maybe more in the future. But these informations don't get in the way, it is just for integrating your articles in social media and search engines and does not show up and disturb your reading experience.

What are articles?

Articles in Blogless are folders. Folders always hold an index.html file with the text, but also may contain pictures, videos, mp3 ... whatsoever. This means an article may be more than just text. This way we stay flexible, all media is stored within the article and no media is stored outside and needs to be managed externally.

Use modern technologies that support simplicity

Blogless uses exclusively modern technologies, like Unicode characterset, CSS3, HTML5 and it's new semantic elements, at least PHP 5.5 and runs well on all modern web browsers. It is not my intention to choose the way of the lowest common denominator or to support a bunch of outdated webbrowsers, but on the other side I like to keep the whole thing as simple as possible. Simplicity is often granted or supported by new technologies, like the new HTML5 flexbox layout model, and makes everything easier, if done well.