The arrow of time

Tincture is a blogging application intended to be simple to use and have really high performance. The former was accomplished by having WYSIWYG editors and logically presented options and the latter by having it generate plain HTTP files on the server.

Users visiting this blog are actually accessing plain files - there are no dynamically generated pages in the user-accessible parts of the blog. This means there are no limits to the performance and scalability of the blog - it's practically limited to what the web server and hardware can push through. It was a nice excercise in building easy to use (and see) sites without relying on PHP on every single step.

A random list of features Tincture currently has (it's still under development) is:

• User-accessible content is in plain HTML files only, served directly by the web server - for better performance and security
  
• Blog content is stored separately in the file system (no database required)
• RSS2, post archive and sitemap are automatically generated
  
• Posts and comments are edited in WYSIWYG editors
• A simple JavaScript-based captcha protectes comments from spam
• Post authors are notified by e-mail about comments to their posts
• By using the comment moderation system the authors can delete or disemvovel comments
  
• There can be multiple users writing on the same blog

There are other features planned but these are currently implemented.

Tincture is available at it's SourceForge project site. Out of the box it requires a Unix-like system to run (yes, this includes Linux) and some knowledge of basic system administration (e.g. what "chmod" does) to set up permissions to the data directories. It isn't plug&play to install but there's a reasonable INSTALL.txt document in the docs directory.