Martini Lab A blog by Chris Williams

Delete All Records

January 4th 2017 by

I’m sure if I sat down and thought about it, the number of times this site has relaunched will come to me. However, I don’t think it is very important. The site is just a temporary representation of the status of my career, the things I am working on, and the occasional opinion post.

The previous version of this site ran a CodeIgniter PHP program called Blocks. It was my attempt to write blogging software that didn't need WordPress. It was a pretty good stab at something I had never tried before. Blocks used AWS to manage images, grouped chunks of different content formats into single posts. You could arrange your content components in any order you choose, such as changing the order of images within a post is a matter of drag and drop.

It wasn’t perfect, however. My PHP coding skills are novice. My code sometimes broke MySQL through normal usage of the app. As long as I was the only one using it, however, that was fine with me. But it ultimately fails to replace what I am already comfortable doing which is writing plain HTML.

This version of Martini Lab is all static, baby. Simple HTML templating with a Node server makes a very handy static site generator. Also, it is worth mentioning that versioning an article in plain HTML with Git is incredibly fast and convenient.

So what’s coming?

A lot has changed in tech, and new projects have come up. The Command Line for Web Developers is out now on Amazon and Leanpub. The ongoing project of making Zeus Comics and Collectibles e-commerce site has a bunch new updates. And Front Porch Conference continues to grow.

Watch this space.