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Ask HN: Advice for building my own blog engine

4 points by backslash_16 ↗ HN
I'm a software engineer and because of a lot of time traveling, have written a lot over the last six months. I'm wondering if building my own blog engine is a worthwhile project. All of the writing I have done so far is private "posts" in markdown that are sitting around on my laptop.

My primary motivation to build my own blog engine is to have some fun reinventing the wheel (isn't that what we do best :)), and being able to customize it completely to my workflow. I think an application with a relatively small codebase that's easy to understand and is built for a specific way of working has its own intrinsic benefits.

The main requirements are 1. Automatic formatting of files written in markdown to posts 2. Navigation and tagging generated from the files 3. Small surface area for attack. I might go towards static site generation so there is no admin API or dealing with HTTP input. 4. Maybe - nice code syntax highlighting and formatting

With all that said, does anyone have thoughts or advice about building their own blog engine?

4 comments

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mooreds
I wouldn't. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but if I wanted to sharpen my skills, I would either find an open source project to help out on (maybe even a blogging one) or work on a side project that either helped people or had a chance of making money.
backslash_16
No problem, you're not a buzz kill. I've thought the same thing.

Building a blog engine isn't breaking new ground and I might as well add features to an existing engine, where I won't have to build everything from scratch, and I can add/build any features I feel that I need.

sarahfaulkner
You can learn a lot from explorations like this.

It may be a good opportunity to check out some existing solutions to make this easier / that does this for you: Gatsby, StoryForj, Webflow, Bubble.