Well, I should have started this blog at the beginning, but here we go.
The site went live yesterday morning at digital ocean, under the url https://tech.web4humans.com.
It works pretty well, in that it functions, content can be edited, and thus it is a living, breathing web site.
Many rough edges, especially internally. Many things to do.
Just before releasing the site, I decided to ditch openid authentication for now, in favor of simplicity and self-containedness. Added a simple self-booting authentication via an environment variable which sets the owner password. Thus, the site can be run without any users other than “owner”.
However, at some point I think I’ll modify the “author” text field from freeform text to a foreign key to the users table. This will require some surgery, not too difficult though, but will require that a user be signed in to have new content stamped with their name.
This does raise the question about permissions for content. Perhaps a simple switch on a content item, controllable only by the owner, to allow other users to edit.
Should think about an audit trail at least for content item editing, since multiple users editing content will otherwise result in confusion.
Another nice field would be a publication status, or simply status, field. This would allow locking down a content item once it is “finished”. It would be easy enough for the owner to unlock the content for editing, but does introduce friction.
Maybe also a “notes” section for a content item, only visible during editing.
Anyway, that’s it for now. More to come, because I have a lot of “thoughts” about this site and it’s progression.