The Blog that Noone Reads

Based partially on the fact that I’ve always wanted to build my own blog engine, partially on my WordPress ownage experience, and inspired by Geoffery Grosenbach’s writing about why rails developers should write their own blog engines, I’ve set about doing just that, which is why I haven’t bothered fixing up this site. It’s taken a bit long than I’d hoped, largely because I already have so much content I have to migrate over. The limited feature set I’d mapped out for version one just wasn’t going to support carrying all my old posts forward.

One of the challenges I’ve been dealing with lately is content formatting. WordPress offers, out of the box, some simple formatting help. It’s nothing major, but things like double newlines are appropriately turned converted to paragraphs and such. All of my past posts rely on these features. The problem is that I’m really not sure what exactly the behavior actually is. I spent some time toying with different things and never really got a consistent reproduction of what the posts look like on the current site.

I finally arrived on Markdown. I’d goofed around with it before, but never really gave it much consideration. Being a web developer, HTML is practically a first language for me. I don’t find it particularly cumbersome to just plunk out all the tags I need myself. After reading John Gruber’s philosophy on what such a system should be, I decided it was pretty much in line with what I wanted. The best part is that, after installing BlueCloth - a ruby implementation of Markdown - into my app, I discovered that just about every post looked just as I wanted without any modification.

So, I’m going to go with Markdown in my new engine. Anybody have any words of wisdom or gotchas I should be prepared for?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 2:13 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.