After far too long I’m rebooting this site to bring it up to date, in a variety of ways.
Partly to bring the content up to something reasonably recent. For the past few years I’ve worked as an iOS and Mac OS X contract developer for a variety of clients. Atomic Bird is not at present a Mac app developer, so there’s no reason for the site to be designed as if it were.
As a result of this, all of Atomic Bird’s Mac titles are now discontinued and can be downloaded for free. For details see (link: about/mac-apps text:our Mac apps page).
The new site will be primarily a blog aimed at iOS and Mac OS X software developers.
The other part of the update was a much-needed rebuilding of the software stack that drives the site. Until recently the site was driven using an ancient version of Drupal. Updating it was not appealing because Drupal turned out to be a lot more than the site really needs. It’s great for a lot of things but not this particular site.
The new site is based on (link:http://getkirby.com/ text:Kirby). I was drawn to Kirby for its relative simplicity. It doesn’t use a database, it just uses files, with a minimum of code to keep things running smoothly. Relational databases are a standard part of web hosting packages, of course. But not needing one means it’s very easy for me to run the entire staging server on my Mac using only built-in software. I can then transfer the whole thing to the live site via the site git repository, or using rsync, or something else that looks good. I haven’t decided which, actually, and as of this writing the site is not even complete.
Page content with Kirby uses markdown formatting, which I also like. Other site software uses markdown too. With Kirby I write site content by just dropping a markdown-formatted text file on the server– that’s it. I’m increasingly of the opinion that any content that can reasonably be done in markdown should be done that way. I also like the simplicity of being able to see all of the site content in a Finder window or a command-line listing with nothing else in the way. This approach really appeals to me.
Anyway, here goes the new site. Let’s find out where it leads to!