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Calm Springs Engine
CMS, 2018-now
Your site. Your archive. Your look. No platform in the middle.
CSE is the engine behind ravenherz.com — a personal publishing system for someone who wants a real home on the web, not a profile on someone else’s feed.
Write pages. Group them into a studio. Drop in photos from your phone. Put music on the same site. Change the skin when the decade changes. Keep the keys.
Why it exists
Most “personal sites” are rented: a theme store, a plugin maze, an algorithm, a bill. CSE is the opposite. One operator. One place. Content you actually own.
It has been running, in one form or another, since 2017. That is not a pitch-deck story. It is a site that had to keep working.
What you get
A homepage that behaves like a portfolio
Categories become sections. You decide what is in the nav, what stays quiet, how much of each collection shows on the first screen, and which piece opens the page.
Three eras of the same site
A 2000s card feed. A 2020s editorial night mode. A modern studio layout. Switch the look without rebuilding the archive.
Pages that are yours
Title, story, cover, tags, comments. HTML when you want control. Markdown when you want speed. A stable address for every piece.
Media without the ritual
Upload a photo — including HEIC from an iPhone — and it is ready for the web. Large images get a light preview so the site stays fast. Audio lives next to the writing, with a player and playlists.
A quiet studio, not a dashboard circus
Pages, categories, files, accounts, settings. Edit in a dedicated workspace. The public site stays the public site.
Room for small apps
Ship a self-contained piece and it sits beside the rest of the site — experiments, tools, extras — without a second hosting story.
You hold the switch
Accounts, who can read, who can edit. Settings you can change without waiting on a vendor. The live site is the product.
Who it is for
Makers who want one address for writing, pictures, and sound. People who still care how a homepage feels. Anyone tired of looking like every other template.
If you need a thousand authors, a plugin marketplace, and a growth funnel — this is not that. If you want a house instead of a listing, it is.