Incorporated – Open Sourcing Our Blog
We open sourced this blog, get it from incorporated.sendtoinc.com
When we launched our new product, Inc, we also needed a new blog to communicate about product features and changes. In the past years whenever I’ve been looking for a solution, I’ve found out that there really isn’t that many great options for companies or product blogs.
There is a new boom of consumer blogs, but I think for your company, you should really own it and make it your own. Many are hesitant running Wordpress because of the vulnerabilities, Wordpress.com is limiting and Tumblr editing capabilities are not that great. Personally I also like do my writing in markdown in IA Writer and share them in our product Inc (which also supports markdown).
There are some new solutions in the market, but I think for a company blog, you want something that is:
- simple
- communicates the product/company
- doesn’t take that much time to set up or maintain
- bonus: responsive and sharing & SEO friendly
So started designing the blog from those principles.
Why Jekyll
Jekyll is a static site creator, and while it lacks CMS capabilities, it’s simple use and easy to host. Also as a designer, I like that Jekyll has just enough complexity. I don’t need databases or backends. I can just work on the templates, pass some variables, loops and generate it to a site.
The problem with Jekyll is that it doesn’t come with that much in the box, not even a simple template or RSS-feed.
Incorporated is born
Even Jekyll is simple, there is a lot of things to put together. I spent a couple of weeks here and there, designing and gluing the templates together. Since I aimed to make it easily configurable for different companies, I tried to simplify as much as I could and design fallbacks if people didn’t set all the information or images.
Since this pretty much my first open source project, I fretted a lot about how the code is going to look, what is the right way to structure things and if people can even get it working!
The stats
After the launch, the blog got pretty good response and after couple of weeks, stats look like this:
- 10,000 unique visitors
- 139 tweets
- 410 stars on Github
- 44 forks on Github
I don’t know how many companies actually use the theme at the moment. Barley forked the theme to their blogging platform, SubtoMe used it for their docs and quick googling turns out some people using the template.
Looking forward
Open sourcing something for the first time was scarier and took more time than I thought. I imagined people going through each line of code and commenting my on stupid mistakes. Of course, no one did. One person was kind enough to submit a fix to my typo, and other people just gave positive feedback.
I hope people get something out of it, even just using it as a base for their own designs. Hopefully, I can also spare some time improving it for us and for others.