Reasons

After programming, writing is one of the things I like doing most. For eight years I’ve been publishing the blog “La Naturaleza Del Software”. Lately the writing frequency on that blog had been dropping, which may seem quite natural, since writing blogs isn’t a very popular activity these days. There are great “bloggers” whose blogs are practically abandoned.

But the truth is that my case wasn’t only about lack of motivation, or shortage of time. The problem had to do with the tool for publishing posts.

In its beginnings La Naturaleza Del Software was published using Movable Type (MT), a fairly popular tool in 2005. The bad thing about that tool is that as the number of articles grew, publishing became tedious, because of the way MT works: it generates the html pages over and over to leave them as static files.

The solution was to look for something more dynamic, and at the time WordPress seemed to me the best tool available. The truth is that I still recommend WordPress to anyone who wants to manage content, from someone setting up an intranet for their company to someone who wants to launch a new media outlet. WordPress is a formidable content editor, scalable, and quite extensible. That’s what makes it the most popular.

But what I didn’t like about WordPress was the administrative effort and the many security bugs that kept showing up. In fact I had a fairly serious security incident that affected one of my blogs.

In 2013 I decided to switch to something more radical; the choice was Octopress. If you’re a programmer, you’re going to like Octopress, because it’s designed around the classic programming cycle: write code - test - fix - publish. It’s interesting, but when you value your time, as I do, you’ll see that all this becomes very cumbersome. After all, what I want is to write, not to program! While they are similar activities, when I write I just want to concentrate on typing the words. With Octopress I had to concentrate on a special syntax, MarkDown, on “compiling” my text to be able to review it, and then on performing the act of “deploying” my site again. And while that’s something I’m used to as a programmer, as a writer I found it a nuisance.

Consider that I also maintain three blogs. And if I was writing little on LNDS, on the others the dust piled up on the posts is already several centimeters thick.

So I decided to try Ghost, and in March 2014 I installed that platform to publish my blog. Ghost is the new kid, the promise of simplifying blog publishing. I expected to find something like Medium (which I’ll talk about in a moment). Ghost is a great tool, with an interesting story, but the promise of simplifying my publishing workflow vanished fast.

The problem with Ghost, one it shares with Octopress, is a very serious bug: MarkDown.

The hipsters are surely going to be annoyed with me, but after using MarkDown, and even publishing a book using this syntax, I consider it a waste of time. I understand the ideas and the concept of MarkDown in other contexts, the same way I understand the value of LaTeX, but I don’t find that they add anything for me as a blog author.

In 2013 I discovered Medium, and experimented with what it offers. I wrote some articles, even adapted some old posts to that platform, and I liked it quite a bit. What I liked most was the simplicity. On Medium you concentrate on the writing, the text; the interface is so minimalist that it doesn’t interrupt you, it’s only there when you need it.

Seeing what they managed to do at Medium, I thought that was the kind of tool I’d like to write my posts with. I thought I could get there with Ghost, but no, and seeing the speed at which that team is developing the tool I decided I couldn’t wait.

(Image by Betsy Weber, used under Creative Commons Attribution, source)

What I did was write my own “Blog Server”.

The project started in May of this year. Soon I’ll write about the technical details of this tool. What I want to tell you now is that while I was writing the code for this first release I got the ambition to do something like Medium not just at the platform level. My idea is to create a community of people who write in Spanish using this “Blog Server”, and that is the idea behind Prosa.

Prosa will be the platform I publish my three blogs with from now on, but it will also be a space to invite my friends to share their ideas. Prosa is an idea at an embryonic stage. An idea I’ll explore little by little.

How will Prosa operate? I’m not very clear on that yet. At least in the short term I’ll invite some friends to try it out. At some other point I’ll publish the source code. Whether it evolves beyond that remains to be seen.

That’s all I have to say for today; soon I’ll publish more about the project. I hope you enjoy it, as I have enjoyed building it.

(Header image: Cherry Blossoms at Night by Yuzuke Omesawa, CC Attribution, source)