I’ve been running my personal blog on Habari for over a year now and I haven’t liked it for a moment. I’ve liked it little enough that mostly it’s been ignored during that time. Finally I decided I needed to switch, and months later I’ve finally settled on something new, Scanty, “The blog that’s almost nothing”.
I was obviously looking for something on the minimal side, I have a growing number of WordPress installations and I definitely didn’t need that kind of overhead for this blog. It occurred to me that Sinatra would be a great platform for an ultra-minimal blog, and on top of that idea I realized I was probably not the first person to think so.
Sure enough there are several entries on the Sinatra site. I took a look at a few, and initially tried to run with Marley but found it to have too many moving parts. Next up was Scanty, which appears to be perfect for my needs.
Scanty is ultra-tiny and as it’s set up on GitHub it’s meant to be forked so I can maintain my own version of the project. Not only does that sound like a good idea, but it’s working out quite well for me.
I took a low-brow approach and migrated my posts by hand (less than twenty of them) as the alternatives were to either create my own importer, or export from Habari into a fresh WordPress install, and then from WordPress to Scanty. I had a handful of comments as well, and while I wish I could preserve them I don’t even know if I want to have comments on this blog anymore. So the comments are just being dumped and while I’ve enabled Disqus, I’m really not in love with it and may just drop that before long.
We’ll see how it goes.