Blogging with Tinderbox

Blogging with Tinderbox

Saturday, June 3, 2006 8:16 PM (permalink)

I recently went back to deciphering Flint, which is a collection of macros and templates to turn Tinderbox into a pretty robust weblog generator. Ever since Radio Userland I have liked the idea of maintaining a weblog locally and then only needing to upload html to a remote server with no server install necessary--easy to keep my thoughts on my laptop where they belong, and very simple to publish what I want to publish. I realize that you can accomplish the same thing with a weblog client like Ecto and any garden-variety weblog app, but Tinderbox's ability to replicate a post-it board full of non-linear notes is brilliant and irreplacable. Why does this matter? Look at the popularity of tagging as an organizational scheme for modern blogs. Tagging has become popular precisely because 'chronological' and 'hierarchical' just don't cut it as organizing principles for the giant spinning cork ball of the creative mind.

Tinderbox, however, lets me link any old note to any other old note, and back again--so my notes can be organized like index cards spread out on a table, regardless of how my weblog reads. That makes it much easier for me to revisit things I might have missed, and keep "back burner" thoughts percolating for when inspiration strikes. It also lets me maintain a private weblog and a public weblog all in one Tinderbox document--a highly usable intersection of Wiki and weblog, all searchable and linked on one big canvas. Again, though there are other apps better suited for weblogging, there are none better suited for brainstorming and organizing my thoughts--and now all I have to do is drag a note from one part of my drawing table to another, and it is published (or not). When you can truly live within Tinderbox for everything, the tool itself stops being visible and starts becoming a natural extension of your thought process and not just a "blog tool."

So I took the Memorial Day weekend as a chance to really dissect Flint and customize it for my own purposes. First, though Flint is available for only a small charge, I do wish it were included with Tinderbox, since it is really necessary to use Flint (IMHO) to generate a weblog that is at least competitive with the basic server-based apps out there (Blogger, Typepad, etc.). Tinderbox, right out of the...uh...box, has a considerable learning curve if you want to turn your box o' notes into a serviceable and attractive weblog. Having said that, I am all for supporting small developers (and Mark Bernstein's support for Tinderbox is fanatical) so I had no issue ponying up another 20 bucks to make Tinderbox really hum.

Flint, it turns out, is a great kick-start to learning how Tinderbox wrangles XML--once you get your head around that, you can pretty much create any kind of web document you want. The macros and agents in Flint take care of generating the basic pages of your weblog, and since it is set up to use CSS stylesheets (divorcing the content from the presentation) it is a snap to customize how it all looks. I am happy with how it turned out--no disrespect to the default stylesheets that come with Flint, but I never feel like I own the place until I have put up my own drapes.

Anyway, I thought about putting up a detailed step-by-step guide to how I wrangled Flint into what you see here, but the process of figuring it out for myself was incredibly valuable. Really. So, who am I to deny you that. But do drop me an email if you have any questions--I'm happy to help.