Andy Chase

I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems.I'm hardly an authority on Weblogs, seeing as I seem to abandon every single one I try to set up or maintain after about 5 entries, but I think that's largely because I haven't been happy with any of the ones available at Sourceforge and other free software sites; systems like Slash and its PHP equivalent PHPNuke are fantastic, but way, way more than I need to run my pissant little waste of bandwidth. I don't need polls, or Slashboxes, or a message board, or 8 dozen pre-defined topics that I'll never use, or the bad, bloated HTML that always winds up in the predefined theme templates. Sure, they're heavily customizable, but to effectively design your own theme you have to learn a whole new API and chances are you'll have to use nasty, crufty HTML to make everything look right and align properly. For that matter, I don't need an extensive user registration or comment moderation system. If (God forbid) I should ever find myself getting enough traffic to warrant a comments and moderation system, I'd just as soon build it myself.

So it comes down to this: It's time to roll my own. I've made abortive attempts at this before, full of convoluted, poorly commented code that I can't even figure out myself six months later, but this time I'd like to approach it as a project that might be of use to somebody else... I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems. It will need to be well-written, easily customizable, and extensible. It will defintely be written in PHP, and it will probably use MySQL for its database, as much as I'd like to use PostgreSQL. (mmmmmm, foreign keys.) Lots more people use MySQL, at least at the time of this writing.

I've learned quite a lot about programming style and programming in general since I started tinkering with PHP at Stan Lee Media, and I've used one hell of a lot of free (as in speech) software in the process. The nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me I should give something back has been growing steadily, and since I haven't really learned C yet it looks like PHP will be the way I can do it.