Check...one, two. Check. Is this thing on?

Eighteen months ago, I began my adventure with Tinderbox. I have a lot more to say about it. But today, I’m pleased to report that I’ve switched this site to a static publishing system using Tinderbox. I’ve had a blast learning its export system and implementing, feature for feature, what I had on my former Ghost-backed site.¹

With the change, I took the opportunity to make several enhancements, including:

1. Dark mode. The site now has dark and light modes, honoring the reader’s system appearance settings.
2. Code highlighting. For posts that include code, I’m now leveraging Prism to provide syntax highlighting; neat, huh?
3. Site search. On all the site’s pages, there’s now a search box in the footer that uses DuckDuckGo’s index. As I add content, I hope this feature becomes more useful.
4. Link post archive. I added a dedicated archive page for the link-type posts.

What I love about using Tinderbox to manage my blog is that I can make changes rapidly. Ghost’s templating system, while good, requires some setup, compilation, and upload steps. For me, the friction of making a change—even a simple one—was always a bit too high. Also, switching to a static site means I no longer need to pay for or manage a VPS. Yay!

I’m excited to write more here. It helps that I have a backlog of posts to publish.

A special thanks to Dave Rogers, Jack Baty, and the venerable designer of Tinderbox, Mark Bernstein, all of whom blog with Tinderbox. Their work inspired me to build a static publishing workflow. If you want to learn more about how all this works, there’s an excellent Tinderbox meetup where Jack and Dave detail how they blog; give it a watch.