subDimension

Barriers

I made a discovery this weekend. It has taken me almost a year to make the realisation but it was striking when I noticed:

Archive Screenshot

I’ve never been a particularly prolific blogger, but 2014 is easily one of my worst years yet.

It’s no co-incidence either that the last post of 2013 was about me moving my blog to GitHub. In moving it to GitHub I created a barrier to making posts.

Previously, I’ve always built my own blogging engines and they have always come with web-based front-ends for managing and posting articles. I could quickly navigate to my blog, log into the control panel and post an article.

The workflow for posting an article from GitHub is really not that difficult but it adds a few small extra steps that act as barriers to me actually bothering to do it and it’s a real shame.

I have a solution. It’s still in progress but the primary functionality is already in place - Burble is a microblog hosted on GitHub as a GitHub Pages site that includes a basic Javascript based editor. The editor uses the GitHub API to make posts directly into the repository, completely bypassing the need to fire up an editor, sync or clone the repository, generating the file with the right name, writing it, committing it back etc etc.

I have some bigger plans for Burble itself, but once I have got the editor working fully (currently it only allows the posting of new ‘blurbs’, no editing or deleting), I will be able to use it to manage my main gh-pages hosted site (this one!). I’m quite excited about both projects, which will hopefully inspire me to write about them a little more.