It was over 2.5 years ago I did anything major to toolmantim.com. For the last 2.4 years I’ve wanted to redesign it and the past 1.5 years I’ve wanted to re-code it. Top that off with working on the new (but yet to be released) Agency Rainford site and Carla’s Hello Canary I’d had enough and found some hours between Squatter and ridiculously well-decorated desserts these holidays to get something new up.

Menki

It was about 9 months ago I started writing Menki, the Enki-inspired blogging software that was never to be. hassox and lachlanhardy pitched in with patches—hell, Lachlan even noticed a PSD I’d pushed and coded up the design for the Menki site w/o me even knowing—total dude. Though Menki wasn’t to be a few spare holiday hours pushing to github and here it is, the new toolmantim, shiny and ready for your viewing.

Simplifying ze codes

Releasing generalised code for reuse by other developers has never particularly interested me, I’m much more excited about doing the simplest thing possible and sharing my learnings with others similar to myself (teach a man to fish yakyakyak). The idea of creating and supporting blog software that has a bunch of features I have no use for quite frankly scares me.

My immediate requirements were simple:

1. Create and preview articles (the last revision of toolmantim had this, as well as auto-saving of drafts)
2. All style and site changes as I authored an article
3. ATOM for the articles
4. A mechanism for article feedback

From the readme:

The idea is that you want publishing to be previewable, simple and versioned. You want to be able to tweak the appearance of your site as you produce more complex articles. You want to simply add an image to your site, not build a whole admin providing file uploads. The major downside (if it is indeed at all a downside) is to publish you need access to your repo so you can git commit and cap deploy, though I could imagine using github’s web editing features to add articles and trigger a site update w/o touching a terminal.

It’s somewhat similar to Marley and other sintra-based blogging apps with the following big exceptions:

• You can use any markup format thanks to HAML’s filters (e.g. :markdown)
• There is no commenting. This forces more quality feedback via email and other blog posts, forces you to properly integrate feedback into the article and avoids the maintenance headache of comment spam.

Feel free to steal and plunder, and you’ve plenty of other options if you want something different. If you’re keen to use it or see something extracted then give me a holler.

A new design

Luckily I have the honour to work with some brilliant designers and don’t often get a chance to give design and front-end coding some time. Things like setting up a grid?grid (props to JSM’s 24ways post), fidgeting with source order and wearing my finger out with trackpad photoshopping has been jolly good fun. This new design borrows heavily where the Menki design left off.

There’s still more work to do on the article layout—for example I’d like to have a left gutter for small images—but it’s a good start.

It would have been a shame to let the Menki logo and website join its cousins in the land of designs-never-published—after all, it was bashed together from the kitchen table of the nerf palace.

Comments and discussion

I’ve debated long and hard about whether to include comments and what value they give the site. Different types of feedback require different tools and consideration and I think it’s the mishmash of all the types of feedback which makes comments ultimately too unwieldy.

Errors and ommissions

Many of the technical articles are old, such as a Getting Rails talking to SQLServer on OSX via ODBC, and discussing software I haven’t touched since writing about it. Errors and corrections end up in the comments and once the article is updated there’s a spattering of redundant comments. Comments like these should simply be integrated and discarded, so I’m choosing to leave these to email.

Open-ended discussions

I’ve tried spurring a discussion by an article which poses a question, such as Full-blown APIs with respond_to?

I’d much prefer to email people I know or a mailing list—this small corner of the web is definitely not the right place for this kind of discussion.

Social commentary and congratulations

They feel good to leave and to receive but twitter is probably more suited to these, especially when most of the time they’re from friends.

Social media and openness

And then there’s that whole Social Media thang.

Open conversations and accountability are important—I like that if you disagree with your standard blog post you can just have a rant right there in the textarea.

Making tools to do this well is hard: live preview, update notifications, spam management, etc. I just don’t want to spend my time writing and maintaining that code.

Twitter is too brief, emails too closed and you can always publish your thoughts in an article (it’s been done before)… so I’m not sure what the answer is. I’ve thought of integrating disqus but I’m not sure that’s the right answer either.

In the mean time I’ve included the old comments in the articles until I converge on some kind of consensus.