Dear Readers,

I started Egg Freckles as a means to share my experiences with technology. I choose Stacey as my CMS because it makes writing and curating a web site easy. Egg Freckles is just a collection of text files written in Markdown. As new text files are written and uploaded to the web, Stacey converts them to valid HTML and adds them to the site. Stacey works without the need of a database. A post on Egg Freckles is a text file combined with a dithered image, grouped within a folder. A category is a group of folders. Posts are displayed in the order they are written determined by a number in the folder’s name. After writing one hundred posts I had one hundred numbered folders stored in Stacey’s content folder. My Newton had gotten very long as the list of posts exceeded the height of several browser windows. Worse, features such as reliable RSS, tags. and automatic archiving of older posts were unavailable to me while using Stacey. In order for Egg Freckles to evolve I needed a better way to manage my content. It was only fair for you, my readers.

Egg Freckles 2.0

If you visited Egg Freckles in the past week you might have noticed a few things have changed. Instead of an index on the front page there is now a group of recent articles. The archive page is now a collection of everything I have published organized by month. Egg Freckles now includes a limited number of smaller articles linking back to the original site. And last, but not least, reliable syndication is a reality thanks to Egg Freckles’ new Atom feed[1]. All of these changes were long overdue, but inorder to implement them I had to give up the simplicity of Stacey and migrate my folders full of Markdown files over to a database powered CMS called Chyrp.

Chyrp

Chyrp is a little like a self hosted Tumblr. You pick what you want to post, be it text, a link, video, audio, a quote, a chat transcript, or a photo, and Chyrp uploads and publishes your content for you. Unlike Stacey, that relies on a series of text files and images grouped together in a collection of folders, Chyrp uses a simple seven table database to organize your entries. Like most modern content management systems you interact with Chyrp through a web based administration page. You do not need to have access to a FTP client to publish. I can posts new articles to Egg Freckles using only the browser on my cell phone. Because Chyrp is modular I can chose to only include the features I want[2]. You may never see a video or full-color photograph on Egg Freckles, but the functionality can be quickly installed if it is needed[3]. Eventually I might add tags, categories, and a limited comment system to Egg Freckles, but I chose to begin Egg Freckles 2.0 with Chyrp’s most important feature, reliable content delivery.

There are many content management systems available for publishing a blog, but I choose Chyrp because of its modular, lightweight design. Maintaining my permalinks and publishing with Markdown are important to me and Chryp makes both easy, even from a cell phone. I hope you enjoy my new reliable Atom feed, and I look forward to all of the good things Chyrp will bring to Egg Freckles in the future.

Thomas Brand