Introducing Caboodle
Why? Mainly because it kept getting hacked and I'd end up unwittingly promoting various brands of viagra in the footer of every page.
But also because I got tired of all of the features, the quite frankly nasty php hacks involved with all of the plugins I was using, copying and pasting files into an FTP client to make a change to the site, manually changing all the permissions to stop the site getting hacked, only to find out that _another_ upgrade had happened and starting the process all over again. It's all a bit much for a mini little site.
For many people, Wordpress is great, but I'm picky and I wanted a change.
So I started from scratch by asking some questions: how do I want to appear online? What should a personal website be? Who is it for? What's the minimum I could offer visitors to the site to answer their questions or do what they want to do?
When it came down to it I had the following criteria for my new personal website:
- It should be a mashup of the various things I do elsewhere online.
- It should look beautiful, and all of the content from other places should have a consistent look.
- It should be totally unhackable.
- It should not require upgrades and updates.
- I should be Ruby.
- I should be able to use Git to manage it.
- No FTP.
- It should have no media on it to get lost.
- It should have no database to get corrupted.
- It should be search engine optimised.
- It should have lovely microformats on it.
- It should be sociable.
- It shouldn't rely on iframes and no javascript widgets.
- It should scrape information for other places and make it look great.
- It should be expandable as new things I do online become mashable.
- It should use HAML and SASS.
- It should be fast.
- It should be lightweight.
- It should be built in a way that lets people make their own in the same way.
- The end result should look so simple as to be unsurprising.
So, I give you this new website and I give you Caboodle, which hopefully fulfils all 20.
Caboodle is a mashup framework. It is a neat way of putting together a simple website that combines content from multiple sources in an elegant way.
At the heart of Caboodle is Sinatra, the beautifully simple Ruby-based framework for the web.
Caboodle is based on the idea of "Kits" (Kit and Caboodle anyone?), and each Kit provides everything you need to interact with a particular web application or service (Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.) as well as handling displaying it on-screen.
The cool thing is that each Kit is actually a Sinatra application itself, so all Caboodle does is chain the applications together and provide some shared logic to make for a neat user experience.
So if you have a small Sinatra application you've already made, turning it into a Caboodle Kit could be as simple as extending Caboodle::Kit instead of Sinatra::Base.
Migrating from my existing site was easier than I thought, thanks to Posterous, who offer a new Wordpress import service. Caboodle just pulls in the posts once they are on Posterous, and it means I can then blog just by sending an email. Perfect for the tube-ride to work.
Help out!
I'm looking for alpha users to help with the development of the site, especially people who'd get excited by the following, which is how I have deployed this website (assuming you have git and heroku already set up):
> caboodle create mynewsite
Please set a value for title:
> My New Website
(... and set a few more variables...)
> cd mynewsite
> caboodle kit:add Flickr
Please set a value for flickr_username:
> aeioux
> caboodle kit:add Linkedin
Please set a value for linkedin_url:
> http://linkedin.com/in/steflewandowski
> caboodle deploy
mynewsite.heroku.com has been deployed
If you're interested in having a site like this, even if that looks like gibberish, I'll put one together for you just to test this out.
And if you're a Rubyist, I'm looking for people to collaborate with on this! Fork Caboodle on github.
