'Inck is Apartm.net News'

Inck is a CMS I created while living in Venezuela for a few months last year. Below are the things about that it I wanted to make, in ascending order of interestingness, which is also the order in which I made them.

Inck is built on a well-organized CSS grid implementation. Normally these implementations use a bunch of divs, but I hate divs. I think HTML should mean something. I had the idea that columns of modules are really lists of modules, and so built them as uls. I also made the series of columns a ul, which I'm still pondering the semantic significance of.

Inck looks like a newspaper. I think newspapers deserve our respect. I also think websites should be more like newspapers, which is to say I think websites are already more like newspapers than we recognize, and should therefore draw more from their traditions.

Inck is implemented without a relational database. People like to talk about NoSQL these day. Here's some NoSQL for you: Text files. Every article in Inck is a text file, formatted more or less like you would format a document you were writing in plain text. This approach is fast, portable, funny, and also eliminates the need for content management interfaces. My content management interface is TextMate and Subversion.

Inck uses Javascript to reflow text into multiple columns across various modules in the grid. This makes Inck look more like a newspaper.

Inck has a consistent vertical type “grid” based on 21 pixel lines. This makes everything line up vertically like in a newspaper, and involved a lot of fun math.

Inck is an experiment in reversing the separation of design, technology and content that is standard (and essential) for larger projects. At this small scale, I wanted to make a content website that recombined all of these elements into one creative process. Sorry if this is pretentious, but the idea was inspired by William Blake's illuminated manuscripts.

(There are currently four Letters to the Editor in response to this article.) Write one.