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March 19th, 2011

Bootstrapped Publishing Platforms

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Preface: This post has been adapted from a previous article I wrote regarding lightweight publishing platforms called Minimum Viable Frameworks.

During the process of redesigning my personal blog, I evaluated several pieces of software including Jekyll, Flask (a Python micro-framework) and Toto among a few others. The framework options now for most web-savvy developers are endless. Furthermore, weighing out the features of each platform can be daunting. The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the platforms that can allow startups to bootstrap the publishing process, often without paying a dime.

So, after much consideration, I decided to go with Jekyll for the redesign as it seemed to meet most of my requirements:

  • No database; posts are stored in plain text, markdown or some other equivalent
  • No server-side language requirements
  • Can integrate easily with Git
  • Can be themed and extended
  • Has well-written documentation and good community adoption

Since the redesign, I’ve really embraced this type of site-building platform and I think many others are starting to see it’s appeal. The popularity of these micro-frameworks has grown tremendously over the last year or two. Numerous blog posts have been written detailing the departures from popular CMS-based blogging platforms like WordPress in favor of more minimalist, git-powered projects. The reasons for switching vary, but one common theme is apparent: It’s simple.

“I really wanted something simpler than WordPress. I didn’t need a CMS. I barely need a blogging engine. I update so infrequently. I want something that creates well formed html (hah), static content and is easy to use.”

Source: Harper Reed

A few web service providers are also catching on, offering extremely affordable (and sometimes free) hosting. Amazon recently announced the availability of website hosting on S3, their storage service. Additionally, Amazon now offers a free usage tier for EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Heroku also offers a free, albeit somewhat diminutive, tier for rapid-prototyping, staging, and testing purposes, as well as actually running lightweight Ruby apps. Google App Engine also offers cloud-based solutions, which can be pushed further with tools like DryDrop. DryDrop enables you to host your static site on Google App Engine and update it by pushing to GitHub. That’s pretty rad.

If you’re in the discovery stage of your startup and want to explore your web publishing framework options, check out the following:

2 Comments on “Bootstrapped Publishing Platforms”

  1. 1 Who Needs Another Startup Blog? | The Startup Cafe said at 2:08 PM on March 28th, 2011:

    [...] of starting a tech company. We hope to provide quality business content but, like we did previously, we also want to provide content for the technology side of a startup business. We’re [...]

  2. 2 BlogBuzz December 31, 2011 said at 2:07 AM on December 31st, 2011:

    [...] Bootstrapped Publishing Platforms [...]

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