A Crazy Blog Engine

Like Brent Simmons, I’m in need of a new blog engine. I’m currently using Jekyll on Github Pages, which is fairly good and reliable. But it’s missing a few key things, like being able to post from my phone and tablet. I’ve tried out a couple of apps for posting to Jekyll on Github Pages, but they didn’t quite work as I’d like.

I like Tumblr’s posting interface, and their iOS apps. The team over there have done a really great job. I’d love to be able to use Tumblr for my blog, but then I wouldn’t have control over the URLs. That’s a deal breaker.

So here’s a crazy idea: I’ll post on Tumblr to my Tumblr blog. Then I’ll scrape the Tumblr blog’s RSS feed, and create a page on my actual site based on the content of the Tumblr post. I’ll be able to use Tumblr’s iOS clients and bookmarklets, have custom URLs, and be able to host it for free on Github Pages. If anyone visits my Tumblr site, I can redirect them to my actual site.

Obviously, there will be some issues because it’s a hack. A crazy, glorious hack.

I haven’t decided whether I’m actually going to do this or not. I’ll be waiting to see what Brent goes with first.

Update

So it turns out Tumblr supports custom URLs. Not by a predefined schema, but it’s better than nothing. This changes things, but I’ll still wait to see what Brent does. He’s got me curious.