I’m gonna build my own blog engine, because it’s never been done before, or maybe I can just do it better! | Johan Driessen

I’m gonna build my own blog engine, because it’s never been done before, or maybe I can just do it better!

Today is the first day of my paternity leave, I’ll be home with my little daughter for at least six months. Which is great! But I immediately started to get the itch to write some code. I needed a hobby project. Since I suck at coming up with great ideas, I decided to be a good Jedi and build my own blog engine!

Yes, I know, there really is no need for another blog engine. Except that there is. The one I would like to use doesn’t seem to be out there. Also, it seems like a perfect way to try out some new technology that I’ve been wanting to use, without a client (or a manager) having opinions about it. And since I replaced the native comments of Subtext with Disqus a few weeks ago, I realized that there really aren’t that many features needed for a blog anymore.

So, my plan right now is to build it on ASP.NET MVC 3, with the Razor view engine. I’ve been wanting to try this whole NoSQL-thing for a while, so I’ll use RavenDB for persistence. I’ve also been wanting to try a distributed version control system (getting reeaaally tired of TFS!), so I’ll use Mercurial and host it on bitbucket. I’m sure I’ll think of other sweet stuff to use as well, and maybe I’ll change my mind on some of these along the way.

But now it’s on it’s way. I called the project “Alpha”, because that’s what it’ll always be. But I aim to replace Subtext with Alpha before the end of this year. And hopefully the process of building it will give me reasons to write some blog posts, since I will not be writing blog posts about the process of taking care of my daughter.

Anyway, the project is available at https://bitbucket.org/nahojd/alpha/overview. Not much to see yet, though.