These are the things I want in a blog engine. I'm tempted to write one myself because I feel the ease of use will let me blog more often.

blog-engine.md

Chris Missal's Unnamed and Opinionated Blog Engine

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The purpose of these requirements are to define a blog engine that is perfect for me. I don't need many features, I just want to blog about code and tech things.

This project should be language agnostic in that I don't care what is used to build it. I'm really looking at it from a user perspective, not a developer. However, the idea of being able to type on one side of the screen and see a live preview of my formatted markdown on the other is most important and I think could be shared as a separate open source project. Again... all just thoughts right now.

Reasons:

1. I feel like blogging engines have too much "junk" in them. They distract me too often because they're trying to be a full-blown CMS. I would rather focus on content and writing than page/category/tag management.
2. When I write blog posts, I would like to see a live preview of my code snippets and formatting as I type. This is the biggest reason I'm even considering building this.
3. I'd like to list my "demands" in public and get some feedback. Maybe what I'm looking for is already out there and somebody can point me in the right direction. This would save me loads of time building something that might be completely unnecessary.

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Markdown

• All posts are going to support markdown as the format.
• When editing, similar to GitHub's zen mode, you will have only a pane to edit on the left, and a preview on the right. This should take up the whole screen real estate while editing, but because your theme will likely condense the formatted live version, it will be about half a screen's width when viewed publicly.

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Code Snippets

• Do what GitHub does with code blocks. Allow for some use (or find a plugin) that detects language and does the appropriate syntax highlighting.

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Themes

• Themes (if any, start with one) are to be very simple. Content is the focus.
• Room for very simple navigation
• I would like this to be supported right away. This means the markup must be written fairly well. I hate seeing sites that look exactly like other sites. Looking at you Twitter Bootstrap.

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Comments

• Comments are to be provided only by Disqus

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Sharing

• Introduce a few "share" buttons/icons. -- Twitter, Hacker News... that's probably good, does anybody use anything else?

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Users/Security

• Login through GitHub
• Maybe others at some point... but selfishly, I don't need anything other than this or Twitter.

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More?

• While I'm looking to build this for myself, I'd love some help if you're on the same page as me. Please comment and let me know how I can take this idea from something neat to something amazing. It's currently just in my head with no code written, but I'd love to get started and have some people help out (if they'd like to use it as well).

I like it.

Discus should be Disqus, right?

And when you say "do what github does for code blocks," can you make it more specific like you did when discussing github and markdown? Otherwise if you don't code this for a while, or if someone wants to help out, and github changes what they do with codeblocks, what happens? I mean, what is it that you really like about code blocks in github? I can't tell from this yet.

I do like the direction of this. I have no idea if there's already something out there that does this kind of thing. I rarely blog, but when I do, I am usually in WordPress, and I feel like it's a little cluttered and (as you say) distracting.

You can do all of this will Github Pages (Jekyll). Here is my blog I use http://prose.io to write my blog posts when I'm being lazy. It saves and commits directly to my repo and Github handles the deploy. I use Disqus for comments.

My blog is VERY simple, but you can do much more with Jekyll and its open source

Just my $0.02

The ONLY reason LosTechies isn't a multi-user Jekyll instance is the Windows Live Writer fanboys (which I was going to look in on my free time - which is never). Not a negative thing, but it is why.

@chris-leonard Yes, fixed. Thanks!

So GitHub uses a specific version of Markdown (http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/) that can detect the language and do the syntax highlighting for you. That's what I want. I'm hoping I can just piggy-back off their success by using a library, but I'm not 100% sure right now.

@jmeridth

Awesome! I was hoping for your input on this. 😄

I had no idea that Jekyll supported multiple bloggers, this is great. Before, and if, I ever go down the path of rolling my own, I'm definitely going to look into Jekyll/WLW support. Even though I don't use WLW on LT, I'd love for blogging on Los Techies to be this easy and nice for whoever wants it.

Isn't the blogging problem solved. Your time would be more valuable to the community share knowledge and creating content rather than solving another already solved problem. There are so many problems to solve in terms of removing friction in our industry. Just sayin. Now, if you want to code something, and your just looking for a pet project because you have an itch that needs scratching, that is a completely different story.

@erichexter Yes, that's exactly why I posted these ideas before spending an entire weekend/week/month building this thing. Honestly, I would much rather have people build things to make my life easier than have to build them myself. Learning from @jmeridth's insight, I think I have a better understanding of what's already out there and what I can contribute to improve things. I really want the side-by-side markdown editing. I know I can focus on that without building yet another solved problem.

Thanks for the input, this is what I was thinking, just wanted to post my thoughts publicly.

I like what you've laid out, but I don't know much about the platforms being discussed. I've been building my own CMS which at its core only takes care of accounts and their management but allows for simple plugin expansion to do everything/anything else. I'm releasing the core on Github publicly in the next couple weeks.

What I want for a blog engine: github gists. I want an RSS feed that pull all my "blog posts" from gists so it can be aggregated somewhere. That's what I want. I HATE writing my post somewhere and then having to push it somewhere else. I'm tired of MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer. Just let me write some markdown in a gist and be done. :)

I like @derickbailey idea, gist == post, basically create a gist with 1 markdown file and somehow link code to a seperate gist file? I would be kinda neat.

You could even use the gist comments as your blog comments. Giving you all the goodness of GitHub flavored markdown 👍

Relevant: http://dillinger.io/

via https://twitter.com/eric_anderson