strange birds

I like Textpattern for the most part. It’s infinitely more suited to me than Wordpress, but it is still mostly a blogging system, which is fine, but not really what I want. I’m not a fan of the proprietary tags, it makes everything neater, but not easy to mentally parse out if I move away to something else.

Ideally, it would be flat files, not a database. Drop textfiles into a folder (Articles), drop images into another folder, and photos into a third. There could be an audio folder, sure. The tricky part is the script—I want to have something run automagically (like a CMS), instead of explicitly so that when I forget it still gets updated. The Articles would be parsed for textile or markdown (specified in the header) and structured around the CSS and they would appear (symlinks? redirects?) to be organized by year/month/day/title but would in reality all live in one big pile. There would be a comments folder under articles, but no commenting system. Email only—thanks be to the trolls—and those that added to the conversation could be copy/pasted into the text file with the same title as the article to magically appear at the bottom. Images would be for articles use.

Photos would be placed up in an order specified by a text file, if it didn’t exist they’d go up chronologically. Photos would not require titles or to called “Untitled”. There would be a gallery page, created automatically of thumbnails (named the same as the photos and created automatically if not provided).

Problems I still have with this mental model: I want a feed, but the few feeds I have from flat file systems (2) don’t seem to have the capability to not rebuild the entire feed on an update. That’s not nice.

I like the Tumblr idea – the curated internet, or more likely, “like what I like!” – but see no way to do this easily: quick links to photos, art, quotations, conversations, blurbs, video, audio, etc.

Is this dumb, to want so specifically and in opposition to what exists? I don’t think so (warning: I’m biased in my favor). I want to be able to pull out what I’ve written years down the line and throw it into a different textile or markdown parser and be on my merry way. No database backups or failures, just the text and the internet (and the video, audio, images…).