Bear with me here. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s worth it to write my own blog engine.

As a clever man said:

In the past few years I’ve been trying to store my writing locally, but writing in public is powerful. It is excruciating to keep writing on the web (especially with inline images, like here) up to date with local notes. And “local” here doesn’t mean “stored in a repo”, like for a static site, because a repo is separate from where I’m writing: it has been Evernote, then Notational Velocity, then nvALT, now Bear, and soon, hopefully, my own open-source project.

I offer a new paradigm: own your writing, publish everywhere. Now it’s usually backwards, you’re writing on the internet somewhere and then maybe, if the service lets you, export what you’ve written.

What does this have to do with a blog engine? It’s a start, where the CMS, or the publishing platform, will only be a container for published writing, not its master location.

My current engine, Aegea, is woefully inadequate due to it being closed-source. And Wordpress and the like are either too cumbersome to setup the way I need (I have a small, but _opinionated_ (as they say) set of necessary features) or don’t have what I need at all.

A static site would fit the bill but it doesn’t have comments, and no, Disqus won’t cut it.

In the end, I _want_ to write one. I’ve been learning some Go and this is a great opportunity to write a medium-sized web-service, which I have never done before. And it’s very motivating because I want to keep my writing published. I’m quite sure a minimal version can be done in a week, so that I can migrate to it, and its incompleteness should motivate me to work on it further.

I have already compiled a minimal list of features to implement first and it’s manageable, so there’s hope.

Can’t wait to share what I come up with.