I've been playing around with the Electron framework, formerly known as Atom Shell. It's a tool based on Chromium and io.js that allows you to build cross-platform desktop applications in JavaScript, and is most famously used as the framework for the Atom text editor as well as the Slack team messaging application. While Apple, Google and Microsoft all offer intriguing platforms and lots of cool features, there was something I needed to build quickly and didn't have the time or resources to find native OS X/Windows developers in which to help me complete it. So I turned to the tools I know best: JavaScript and, especially, Ember.js.

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Well it's been a little over two years since I last completely reconfigured this blog, and now that it actually (mostly) works I felt like it would be fun to take a little tour of the more interesting features of this blog. The current iteration of the blog is written in Ember.js, and the entire blog application lives on your browser, hosted via Amazon's CDN. This post explains how I built a pseudo-static web site with Ember and Ember Data.

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If you've ever browsed the source code of this blog, you might have noticed a directory called lib/active_copy. Opening up that directory is somewhat interesting, as you'll be able to see exactly how I take Markdown files with YAML front matter and render them through ActionView. But unfortunately, unless you fork this repo and hack it to bits, you were unable to use ActiveCopy in your own Rails projects.

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