I’ve always liked playing with blogging systems, and now I think I might actually try to build my own again.

Back in the day, I’d try to hack up WordPress or Textpattern to do what I want, but problems inevitably arise. Because basically every system out there is a dynamic one, you have to keep your code up to date, meaning maintaing hacks were hard, and just keeping the thing operational was a pain in the ass, especially for a silly little self maintained blog.

In that world, outsourcing the problem is a great idea. Give up some freedom of configurability, but also not have to maintain anything. Enter hosted, wordpress, tumblr, etc.

But these things don’t quite do what I want. And to really hack them up, I have to pay money which is lame. And it’s quite hard to do any kind of real html5/js-y stuff when you’ve delegated the code to someone else.

We’re now in the era of iframes. I can outsource the “hard” dynamic parts of a blog to other systems. The “content” part of the blog is, and always was pretty easy. So here’s a plan:

  • Use some really dumb templating system to generate static pages for the content
  • Maintain posts in text files. Ideally synced with dropbox, so I can create posts just by plopping down files locally. Maybe hook it up to markdown.
  • Use FB open graph comments for feedback
  • Use like button
  • Let google handle the search
  • Maybe hack something up for RSS, though I’m not sure I really need if it I come up with something to just post new stuff to my fb feed.

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