Deciding against a Content-Management System

Published on Friday, 10 March 2023.
At 328 words, this article should take about 2 minutes to read.

What CMS's have I considered?

• Netlify Decap CMS
• forestry.io
• WordPress
• tina
• Prose
• frontaid.io

So, Thom, why don't you want to use any of them?

First off, there's nothing wrong with any of these products. Some are very good indeed at what they do. And, for client work, I'd 100% use them!

Form is everything, dahling!

These articles aren’t the longest or most in-depth pieces but they’re more than short thoughts to be blurted on social media - for that I have Mastodon.

They contain details that I'd like to double-check and verify (usually with too many tabs open) and this is a lot harder on a phone.

Physical keyboards

Maybe it's because I'm old, but I prefer using a keyboard to write longer form content. Perhaps a hang-up from typewriters and word processors but my thumbs get so very tired of phone typing after a minute or two.

Obsidian

I use Obsidian for note taking and writing in general. It's so much better (for me) than any of the myriad other note-taking apps I've tried!

It does mean that I can make tweaks to a draft post or start up an idea when I'm away from my laptop - I just can't publish to the whole internet.

Word Vomit

For me personally, there’s too much temptation to publish ill-considered posts when the barrier to deployment is so low.

• Have an idea
• Open CMS
• Publish idea
• Regret

Conclusion

So, I think we've established that I'd rather not be writing these articles on my phone.

But Thom, you can use a CMS on desktop!

Of course, but if I'm on my laptop then the tools I'm most comfortable with are Obsidian, terminal, and VS Code - why change that?

Keeping the articles I publish as markdown files to be deployed as a part of a process solely involving my laptop instead of my phone means I’m rarely rushed to deploy anything and, hopefully, this consideration is evident in my articles.

Fin

onward-journeys module