About this blog (1): Custom Made

In my first post I promised to write some more about this blog and how I created it. I’m going to write a few posts about this subject, so let’s start with the first one: Why I use custom made blogging software.

Before creating my own blogging software I looked at a lot of out-of-the-box products or blogging platforms (why reinventing the wheel?).

Because I’m on a journey from Java development to Ruby on Rails development I specially looked at the Rails based blogging software, like Typo, Mephisto and SimpleLog. There are a few reasons why I decided to build my own blog from scratch:

1. I wanted a simple blogging app. Not one with which I could maintain my complete website. Just use it for the weblog and integrate it into the website (which is also a Ruby on Rails app). This must be possible with the three programs I looked into, but all the tutorials and howto’s I found were based on building a standalone weblog.
2. For another project I’m working on I needed the possibility to create a lot of (small) weblogs. In Mephisto it’s possible to create multiple pages which behave like a weblog, but I needed a weblog which is related to a user.
3. I’m not that experienced with Ruby on Rails and building your own blogging app seems to be a good start 😉

Next time I’ll tell some more about the status of the software and what still needs to be done.