Building a blog (part one)

One feature of Mixture that I've been looking forward to for a long time was Collections that landed this week in a general release alpha. It has some super-powerful features that, we think, takes static blogs to the next level. But I knew that once we got it built I wanted to use it for my own blog.

My blog was running on Wordpress for a year or two and I migrated it to Mixture with minimal hassle earlier this year. But it was missing some features which are solved in the new Collections feature pretty neatly...

This is where my blog has been for past few months: http://petenelsoncouk.pete.mixture.io

I decided to do the migration in various stages and document each stage as a working site on Mixture so that I could link back to them in the finished blog. The first stage has been collecting all the markdown files that I exported from Wordpress (there are a couple of plugins that help do this) and adapting the YAML slightly to better work with Mixture. This post I'm working on now has the YAML:

title: Building a blog (part one)
tags: [tech]
published: true
date: 2013-06-06 19:06

building-a-blog-part-one

Then I checked out the Collections test project from Github and starting chopping bits out that I didn't need. This has resulted in the blog that you see now - it's really basic and there are all kinds of things wrong with it - however it's the first stage of an iterative process that I will proceed with over the next couple of weeks.

The next stages will be adding functionality, improving layouts, adding images back in and finally playing with fonts and colours.