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This is the Internet and you are reading a website. There are probably cookies (and quite possibly witchcraft!) somehow associated with this page. If you're unhappy about that, switch off your device and do something else instead. While you're at it, delete all your online profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and destroy your mobile phone. Never use bank, credit cards, or any kind of electronic payment. Wear a mask in public, walk with a limp, and swing your arms in an eccentric manner. Don't drive a car. Book taxis under a false name and pay with cash. (Lidl have some nice aluminium foil if you require a hat.)

Jonathan Craddock (dot com)

I'm in the (ongoing!) process of redesigning my site - which was previously running the Joomla! CMS, and I think was probably a massive overkill for my actual requirements. I looked at a range of alternate and (mostly) lightweight CMS frameworks, and still couldn't find something that felt exactly right.

Whilst I'm sure the last thing the world needs is another CMS, I've decided to go down the route of creating my own semi-static framework, which will be just sufficiently dynamic to be easily updated. I want a simple approach that will allow me to publish a few (sadly infrequent!) reports of hiking trips and present my photography and music portfolios.

I also want a clear, simple view. Apps such as Pocket and Evernote Clearly meet the need to strip away website clutter and present users with exactly what they want to see. Why not just cut out the middle man, and don't waste everyones time creating all that unnecessary clutter in the first place?

Towards that end I'm using a very minimalist Bootstrap template and the Michel Fortin PHP Markdown Library for the Markdown translation. The navigation is currently trivial (and coded manually) but could be automated fairly easily. I want a situation where updating the site simply requires dropping a Markdown-Extra formatted text file into the appropriate sub-folder.

As of early June 2014, I wrote some additional code that pulls a block of JSON data from the end of a Markdown file, and this has added some useful functionality. I've implemented this same code on dtvcrc.co.uk where I'm using it to pull in coordinates for location maps, among other things.

Aims

Acknowledgements

As per the Bootstrap usage instructions, note that Bootstrap includes Halflings from Glyphicons. The Clean-Cut website mock-up on my homepage uses a generic dark monitor from AIT Themes. Finger-swipe PNG icon from EasyIcon. There's a handmade texture pattern used in some of my trip reports from Subtle Patterns.



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