Brimstone

by on 2018-06-06 | License Permalink

Update: Brimstone is now retired and archived, and this website is currently generated by a static site generator. Please see the Site Notes page

Brimstone is the code I use to run this website. You can find the code on Gitlab and, for the time being, on Github. I want to keep this post as a living post, and keep adding to it. That way I hope this post acts like a philosophy.txt.

The code isn’t anything special. I write it for several reasons:

Goals

The goal of this software is to provide a simple, lightweight, option for publishing text content online that allows a user (me) to:

And allows others to view my content in a way that suits them. So far this includes:

Why not use Wordpress, Ghost, etc.?

I have no explicit issue with them - but they’re not really my thing. I’ve used wordpress for a variety of things in the past and it suits those things, but I wanted something light. I’ve never really used Ghost, but already you’re dealing with a fully-fledged CMS with complex management options and theming potential. I wanted something that does not put any Javascript on the public-facing portion of the site, and only uses minimal Javascript for the UI in the admin-panel. I also wanted something that didn’t require a lot of configuration.

Equally as important, I wanted to play and develop a few skills.

Ok, so what’s it built on?

The current version of Brimstone is built on the Symfony PHP Framework. To run the current version you will need PHP 7.1, and Composer to install the vendor packages.

It’s released under the GPL 3. This means that if you fork Brimstone or use any of my code in projects, you’re also obliged to release under the GPL. Symfony code is released under the MIT License which, thankfully, allows me to use MIT components inside of a GPL’d project.

Ok so what does it actually do?

It does pretty much what any home-brew blog software can do, but specifically: