I Am Still Alive

Nearly every web project I Am Still Alive has produced for clients in the last year has required some content management system. In all of those cases, I’ve provided a Rails-built custom-designed backend app to manage the various sites.

Over the last few months, I have organized the diverse functions (blog, photo gallery, tagging, drag-drop sorting, user authentication, contact management, geolocation, e-commerce, event management, ...) into one stable, flexible system that I can redeploy fairly effortlessly. It’s been working out well and clients have really taken to the system.

I have taken to calling the app ‘Backlight’ as it largely started coming together while working on sites for a pair of photographers (launching shortly).

In any case, it’s my plan to repurpose and then release Backlight as a hosted service (websites with custom domains hosted/powered by one app) in the next few weeks. I am going to post updates every now and again about the process of refining it further in the run up to launch. The app is actually quite similar to the hosted artist portfolio management system we have in the works over at Artlog.