Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

What do I mean by my own Hello World? Well this site is it. A fairly recent post on StackOverflow asked the question "Why does every man and his dog want to code a blogging engine?"  Apparently it's a common topic of discussion; Haacked, NCB, SO, Dot net Slackers. For me it's a simple decision, nothing I found that was open source or fit my needs close enough to what I wanted at the time. Actually it's deeper than that. This app started as a simple file upload service for my own site, or rather Spencer's site but quickly became the application core of this site.

Back then it allowed me to quickly upload images, and just display them easily enough around the site. It also made sense for me because then all of the images were in one place. Of course as this person pointed out an image upload service is another starting point. But this was also just the tip of the iceberg. At one point I became bored of trying to keep track of all my images and pages and making sure all the links and images still worked when I changed a page. Or even when I re-did the front page I then wanted to retain this info and just move it to another area of the site. This was cumbersome at best and quickly went from fun to do - to annoying.

I gave Community Server a try but at the time my internet was hardly enough to run it and the machine I had it on was well less than a doorstop. I even looked at BlogEngine.Net, Subtext, and even Wordpress. But none really fit the bill for what I wanted so they all got pushed to the side. That's also really when I decided to get into making this app bigger, better and more tuned to what I needed from a site. Those other app gave me more ideas of what I wanted, how to do it and most of all, reinforced what I did not want to do and did not like about them.

This site allows multiple users/blogs, a full image gallery with slideshow support on the way and even Syntax Highlighting in the blog for coding, manageable comments, archiving so screens stay some what clutter free, and even a history of changes to a blog post as your writing it.  Also some what web 2.0 ish with more then just CRUD operations. Namely the comments, the multi-file uploader, and the history viewing. There are a number of other features as well. Even some that started then changed into something completely different.

There are also a few other features that the site has for me that are not visible to members/users. Though this list is much shorter.

So in the end why did I roll my own "blog engine", because I wanted to learn something new just like most every one else that wrote there own. Plus it's given me the opportunity to expand my mind and delve into something that I like even at the risk of being called a nerd. After all working with computers and software is what pays my bills.

Currently development on the site has for the most part halted with the new edition to the house. I've only managed to make one update since the middle on January. But with more ideas on the horizon, and a greater understanding of a number of things I'll be back into it in no time making it faster and easier on the eyes for FireFox and IE 8 visitors.

So the next time you feel the need to reinvent the wheel, I suggest you do. But be sure to explore other options first. After all after 2 years of making this wheel rounder and rounder, I still find it's a little too square.

So what's a wheel you've reinvented?