The blog engine is dead, long live the blog engine

August 19, 2014

In a world with numerous blogging services and an exploding scene of blog engines I still fail to find something that really speaks to me and makes me want to write week out and week in. In the current incarnation of this web site and blog most of the posts where written using Ghost that in many ways are a great blogging platform, but it is not finished. Ghost is still only no alpha, some might say beta, does not matter it is not finish and it still lacks a lot of key features for running a blog. I recently also looked at Pagekit and it shows such promise, but it is also in alpha and not fit for production, not even a small and sporadic blog as this.

The hosted services such a, Tumblr, Medium and many ways Google+ and Facebook Notes does not fulfill my needs or the purpose of my blog. I want to have full control over how it works and looks like and none of the previous mentioned services allows for that. They are all good services but not for me and I’m also not that fond of the centralisation of content and some of it hidden in silos where you have to login.

What about the old work horse Wordpress? I was a huge fan of Wordpress in 2005 - 2006 and I think it all went downhill from there. Sure Wordpress has its place in todays online publishing world, but it has become to bloated and still does not have a descent media management and no, I don’t want to use a bunch of plugins.

Then we have the static page generators like Octopress and Hugo, where I as a Ruby fan might go with Octopress or maybe even Jekyll I find Hugo most exciting since it is written in Go. Hugo shows great promise and might be what I’m looking for.

So what to do? Write your own? Yes indeed! It is an insane task and I’ll most likely be the only one using it. I’ve named it Strutter - A web publishing tool for web folks. It powers this whole site since June 2014 and it has been a great project to work on. It is far from finished, just like many of the others, but it does what I want. After trying out a few of the engines mentioned here during the weekend and taking in account the expericene from tools like Joomla, Drupal and ExpressionEngine I decided to complete Strutter so that it at least reach version 1.0.

It seems that I’m not alone, a lot of fellow programmers are writing their own publishing tools, mostly for the same reason or maybe they are just control freaks. However, it feels good to have written a piece of software that I self want to use!

The blog engine is dead! Long live the blog engine!