Inck is Like Ink
by Nicholas Hall on July 25th, 2011Inck is an ongoing experiment in grid-based frontend development, databaseless content management, HTML5 and CSS3 techniques, whimsical layout, and the recombination of design, content and code.
I write, design, and build Inck as one project, switching between writing code and words when I feel like it, or when a change to one suggests a change to the other.
Inck’s ‘content management system’ consists of text files parsed for linebreaks and nothing else, formatted beyond that with HTML. The front page is configured with a simple list of articles, word counts for where to break them, an optional banner headline, an image embed, and CSV data to populate the sidebar, all in the file ‘a1’.
Because everything is a file, everything--content and code--is managed through a version control system, originally Subversion and now Git.
Because I have intertwined writing and coding, I've discarded the ambition of treating ‘content’ as abstract data that flows through an abstract system to reach a consumer in an abstract presentation.
Content management systems are a failed idea. ‘Content’ is a failed idea, as though the fact of two things’ being text meant they had some logical relationship. Everything on a computer can be represented as text, a string of numbers one and zero at least. But we know that most of the things on a computer, spreadsheets and photographs and songs, are different, and require different tools.
That extends to the types of text in written language. Articles, short articles, long articles, poems, dialogues, lists, quips; these are all different,… continued, with one Letter to the Editor »
