Creating the 'Perfect' Tech and Writing Stack

Yesterday I came up with the most phenomenal idea of how to get my writing workflow, ideas for ODTWE and tech stack in ‘perfect’ combination. Well, in theory (unsurprisingly).

My intention with the ODTWE project is to have the Ruby on Rails site as a repository of the content, perhaps with the bidding and payment functionality added on top, though this is yet to be decided. I want to have each story available in a variety of media formats, including text, audio and images. I was planning to host each of these media formats in places that are ideal for them and that will give me extra exposure such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Deviantart. Then the RoR WebApp would assemble these pieces into each story and add on any extra information and functionality.

The missing part was what to do with the text. Ever since starting with SitePoint, I have become an increasing convert to writing with Markdown, I find it cleaner and easier to work with. So far I have been using Scrivener for my long form writing and whilst I love it for research, gathering ideas and ‘traditional’ writing, I have found it lacking in online delivery of content. If Literature and Latte would open up an extension framework, I would write one to achieve what I want and be exceptionally happy.

I then looked into the plethora of static page site generators such as Jekyll and wondered how I could get my content out of Scrivener into a GitHub repo (Or DropBox) without too much effort. I noticed Scivener’s sync feature that lets you compile files into an external folder and after some tweaking, this was a good starting point.

Next I looked into a wide variety of options for integrating static markdown files into the RoR WebApp and found many possibilities, too many to get my head round. It then got me thinking that if the main stumbling point on getting the markdown files into the WebApp was that somewhere along the way I needed to give each story an ID value to handle voting and payment features, what if I outsourced all of those, to Patreon for example.

At this point, my mind imploded as I tried to balance all the potential options open to me. So, in the meantime I have decided to keep following a more ‘lean’ path and not get too distracted by creating the ‘perfect’ stack and instead just release the writing I have in a basic way (i.e. HTML files), returning to this issue at a later date once I know if it’s worth it or not.

That’s it really, I felt like sharing my thoughts in case anyone had any ideas.