Let’s keep this short and simple. I’m a big fan of Faircamp by Simon Repp, but it is a tad too opinionated for me. Mind, for most people, this is the correct choice. It is somewhat easy to install, easy to use and easy to understand. But I am both an artist and a web developer and I maybe have other ideas about how the website should look and how it should work.

That stupid name

It is a stupid name. I thought about Jekyll-Camp (Quite possibly, the heart of this project is going to be a Jekyll plugin), but that’s stupid as well and I wanted to not use the camp thing, I think, the “band” being the more important part of the Bandcamp name when it comes to music. That is not to say that I think Faircamp is a bad name.

The idea

I’ll be working on a bunch of things at once and so I am not 100% sure how this is going to look like in the end. Here’s a bunch of things I need to figure out (while letting myself being heavily inspired by Simon’s choices):

  • A good encoding pipeline
  • The best choice for the static site generator. I sort of assume that I will at least prototype this in Jekyll, simply because I know it quite well. I’ll look into other options as well though, as I know a lot of people have issues with getting Jekyll to run.

The vision

  • Provide an opinionated experience out of the box that is very similar to Simon’s Faircamp in terms of ease of use and high quality output.
  • Provide hooks and extension points native to the static page generator so that basically everything can be customised.
  • Implement or choose the moving parts in a way that will allow to easily transfer them to other projects. I’m thinking about things like the encoder pipeline, the id3tag parser, the waveform render process, the player widget etc.