I'm a developer and I use GitHub all day, so naturally it would be awesome if I could use it for my blog. I've done the whole "roll your own" so many times I have lost count.
I started making my own blog/personal site back in 1997 and really fell in love using Microsoft Frontpage 1997. It was an awesome time to be on the internet. The .com bubble was starting and new web innovations were happening all over the place.
DHTML (Dynamic HTML) was my first foray into javascript. I remember using DHTML snippet websites and copy/pasting little javascript snippets into my source code. This allowed me to do some amazing things like…. On hover menus, simple fade animations, blinking text, and every other terrible myspace.com design abomination a teenager thought would be cool. Those were good times.
Later I started building sites with PHP and rebuilt my contentless website with every blog engine or cms I could try.
- PHPNuke
- e107
- Postnuke
- (Insert a few abandoned/no-name cms projects)
- Wordpress
- Custom (Ruby on Rails)
- Custom (Node.js)
- Ghost
- Plain text / static html
- Medium
- Github Wiki
- Finally, Github Gist
What I have learned over the years is the platform is important, but not as important as the content. I have spent so many hours setting up authentication, WYSIWYG editors, workflows, etc. But when I reflect, there are only a few really important features for a good blog engine.
- Markdown / Simple HTML design / theme.
- Easy ability to upload content.
- Integration with other content creators (think Medium or Github)
- Ability to add your own custom domain.
- Reliable hosting.
- (New) Diffing and revisions.
- Inline images / links.
Some less important features include
- Comments.
- Collaboration with other editors.
- File attachments.
Stop messing with platforms, start making content
This is an interesting idea. Will be curious how it develops. Would definitely be great for casual blogging.