How Zone Five Works
Here’s a look at how Zone Five works…
Hosting
Zone Five is hosted on Blot. It’s fast, easy, and cheap1:
Blot serves up static html files so it’s really fast to load. The only bottleneck I can see when loading pages is loading photos, but they’re fast enough that I’m ok with it.
I have a folder on my Macbook (synced across my Macs through iCloud, actually) that contains all of the files for Zone Five. I have subfolders for drafts, pages, posts, and for files — which holds all of the photos. I have about 170 Mb of photos in there so far. If that becomes a problem I can pretty easily host the photos on AWS but I think it’ll be ok. The limit is 1 TB of bandwidth + storage per year so I think between text and photos I’m using approximately 0.03% of my allotment…
Overview of how simple it is to publish with blot:
Editing
Posts and pages are all just simple text files written in Markdown. I like Md because it’s simple to learn and easy to read without having to generate html to see previews2. If there’s something I need to do that Markdown doesn’t do, I can just insert html. It’s really great. And in 2019 just about every text editor supports some flavor of Markdown.
I’m currently using Brackets for text editing. It runs fast, looks nice, and at $0.00 I can’t beat the price. One big deal with Brackets is that it supports git for version control and file syncing inside the app (more on that in the next secion…) so I don’t need a separate app for uploading and syncing.
Below is a screen grab of the in-progress Welcome page in Brackets. The left side is all of my files. The bottom of the editor window shows git changes. They only show up after a file save.
Working on Zone Five in Brackets app - right click and open in new tab to see the image larger
That all seems complicated but it isn’t. I’m just using it as a text editor that uploads and syncs to Blot with git. More on that in the next section.
I’m planning to take a look at the next version of Coda when Panic launches it, but if it’s as much as the current version ($99!) then I’ll probably stick with Brackets.
Uploading & Syncing
Blot lets you use Dropbox for file sync. That’s fine and it works well, but for a couple of reasons I’ve decided to go with a dedicated folder on my Macbook and to use git to sync everything. First, I share my wife’s Dropbox account because I don’t have enough need for one to justify my own. And constanly getting sync notifications every time I save a text file would get annoying for her very fast. Also, with Dropbox sync you have little to no control about when files get synced to Blot. New file in the folder? SYNC. Edit a file and save it? SYNC. Rename a file? SYNC. It’s just silly.
I’d prefer to work a while and batch changes to Blot. With git I can do that. I can edit multiple files, add a bunch of photos, rename them, etc., and send all of those changes at one time when I’m good and ready. As soon as they’re uploaded, they’re on the site. Ready to go.
Another nice feature of using git is version control. If I screw something up I can go back in time and revert to a previous sync. I haven’t had to do it, yet, but it’s nice to know I can if I need to.
That’s it…
That’s how Zone Five works. It’s basically just a folder of stuff on my Mac. It works great for me and it’s low friction so I still enjoy doing it.