shellCMS moved from markdown to html

I posted yesterday about my growing reservations about markdown:

http://bkhome.org/news/201709/limitations-of-markdown.html

An additional comment that I can make, is that due to it's limitations, there are many markdown extensions, trying to get it up to a reasonable level of functionality.

I am sure that others out there must have come to the same conclusion about markdown. Yes, read this:

https://www.adamhyde.net/whats-wrong-with-markdown/

Yep, I agree 100%. Apart from simple github READMEs, markdown is an awful fit. It is a bad fit for blog posts like this one, as I soon found out when I wanted to do more than rudimentary posts.

Well, Fatdog has gone over to markdown, and it seems just about everybody is on the markdown bandwagon, so I got seduced.

I played with markdown briefly for use as local html help pages in Easy OS. Soon realised the limitations, and went back to html.

Then there was BashBlog, which became shellCMS, and I used the nice markdown plugin for Geany. Started hitting gotchas, and doubts crept in.

So, what to do? Fortunately, shellCMS is a small bash script, that I can readily modify, unlike those enormous CMSs out there, where you are locked-in to whatever way they want to do things.

Simple solution, I rewrote shellCMS to write posts with a html editor. Not just any editor, I am using SeaMonkey Composer, a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) html editor. Using it right now to type this post.

Now, creating a post is so simple! What I am typing in is exactly WYSIWYG. Without the page-layout stuff of course. As I mentioned in the post yesterday, just because html, css, javascript, etc., supports page-layout and all sorts of fancy things, doesn't preclude writing simple non-page-layout html, as I am doing now.

But, anything extra? A table? No problem! Lovely GUI tools to create a table just as I want.

I recall several months ago, I mentioned to a friend, a web page designer, that I use SeaMonkey Composer to create my web pages, and he smiled indulgently, and commented that that is the "old school" way of doing it.

Well, now I have a CMS, in my case a static site generator, so have the advantage of a consistent page layout, headers, links, buttons, etc., and I am still using SM Composer!

I haven't uploaded this new shellCMS yet. Want to do a bit more testing. I converted this blog, which was fairly easy as there are as yet few posts -- it required replacing all the raw .md files with .htmraw. The latter, ".htmraw", are my posts.

Tags: shellcms