Thinking about my own 'blog

Fri Nov 9th, 2001 01:16:59 AM EST

Diary Entry 59
[ << Prev | Diary Index | Next >> ]

Today I've been idly considering the possibility of writing my own weblog. This is probably the #1 software cliché today, like writing a widget set or window manager was a few years ago. Still, it's enticing.


The goal wouldn't be to take over the world, or even to produce a weblog for general consumption, but instead just to write one for use on my own webpage. I already have a nice mirror of my k5 diary on my webpage, so extending it into a weblog would be natural. It wouldn't be straightforward, though, since my webpage is generated statically by a Makefile and a bunch of Perl scripts and preprocessed through GNU m4.

I've done plenty of web programming before, having written TeamSCOPE. For me, one of the biggest lessons from that project was that C is even less ideal as a web programming language than I thought when I began writing it. In fact, I think the most fun way to begin writing a 'blog would be first to design and implement a language interpreter for the language to write it in. The only question is, what language model should I start from? I think either a Scheme-like language or a Smalltalk-like language would be the best choice. A careful design might even lead to the possibility of implementing a compiler to C instead of an interpreter.

The 'blog's feature set would be novel. It would center around a set of diary entries, similar to scoop stories or Slash articles, which could have comments, etc. Nothing interesting there. But I'd also add a bunch of traditional PDA features; in particular, a calendar and a to-do list. People could add comments in these sections, too, suggestions for prioritization or whatever. Now, frankly, I don't know if anyone would actually be interested in doing that, but the thought amuses me.

Other features that might be worthwhile, looking at the current state of my webpage, is some kind of photograph album, a set of projects along with their current statuses, and a catalogue of my writings.

Chances are that I will never write any of this, but it's fun to think about. One of the biggest obstacles, besides time, is that I'd need to get some webhosting where I could actually do dynamic content.


Last updated 03 Apr 2004 21:17. Copyright © 2004 Ben Pfaff.
May be freely redistributed, but copyright notice must be retained.