Statamic

If you have followed this blog over the years you know I am always changing something. So this may not surprise you that I have switched blog platforms, again. I had been using Tumblr which is perfect for my normal posting routine. Sharing quick links, photos, quotes, and occasional articles. As much as I liked Tumblr some things just irked me.

• They control your data
• No easy way of setting up redirects in bulk
• No importing

Mainly the control of my data is what I didn’t like. I want all my content stored where I can do what I want with it. Of course, they do offer an API but what if one day they stop providing it?

I did have a short stint of using kudos which is a flat file Laravel app created by Ian Landsman and it worked great for me. Except for one major drawback. You still have to open your editor and write the post and then push. Just too much work for me and my number of posts went down considerably. I guess I am just lazy 🙂

A few weeks ago I came across a new cms named statamic and quickly applied for the beta. I ended up getting just before it was officially released but had enough time to play with it and enjoy how they set up the system. Everything is stored as flat files just like the jekyl flavor. But with one huge difference and that is the ability to post from an admin section. Which still just creates flat files.

So now I can post quickly from the admin and later on when I feel like it sync with git so I have a full off site backup of all my posts. Even though the cms is pretty basic the possibilities are pretty much limitless with what you can do with it. For instance, I have duplicated my whole Tumblr setup with it. Now I have all four post types and it really wasn’t much work. Just a few hours over two evenings.

Statamic is commercial but the pricing is very fair and I don’t mind paying for something top quality with support. All my little questions have been answered quickly and with a good answer. So yes I fully endorse what they are doing and excited to see them grow.

I will miss the Tumblr followers, but I always have an rss feed you can use to keep up to date 😉

Hosting

Another negative is hosting. With Tumblr it is free and well you can’t beat free. I tried aws but it was to expensive for me. I am outside of my year free micro and it seemed like a micro was running around $30 a month. I started researching other hosting options and was going to go with a shared system but meh. I would rather have full access to do whatever I want. After browsing what felt like weeks I settled on Linode and was lucky enough to get in when they offered a $100 credit. Woot. 🙂

So now this site is running on Linode with Ubuntu, Nginx, PHP5-fpm, and apc. All data is stored in a private git repo at BitBucket.