David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

When it comes to web applications, I tended to fall back on a portfolio of open source applications. For blogs, I would use Nucleus, for content management, Website Baker was my preferred weapon. The only problem with this is the Website Baker wasn't as flexible as I required it to be and Nucleus now appears to be a stagnant project.

Lately, I've been using a lot of hand coded solutions as these do exactly what I want. I don't need a spiffingly wonderful backwnd if it's just me using it. I don't need plugins and modules that I never use.
 
The same's true of blog software. It's designed to fit as many applications as possible. Wordpress is the blog of choice for many but I've never liked it. I've tried it but can't seem to get to grips with it. Options are tucked away where I don't expect them to be, template editing is complex and you have to install plugin managers to manage clusters of plugins!

This site is now feeling bloated. I've added hacks and tweaked here and there to get it to look and feel as I expected but the seams are falling apart. The Technorati plugin I use doesn't work first time so I now have to edit each post after it has been posted to retrospectively add the tags.

The next and previous links broke when I redesigned the site from pink to red and black. I certainly didn't do anything different but the forums didn't really help so I've just made do.

So I'm tempted to build "Davepress" (I really hope that's not what it would be called!) that would do everything I wanted:

• The ability to add and edit posts (no delete option as posts shouldn't be deleted - MySQL admin can handle that if required)
• SEO friendly URLs out of the box
• Lightweight code with the focus being made on speed
• Social bookmarking options
• Comment posting
• Trackbacks
• RSS feeds and pinging ability
• Anti-spam systems
• Ranking ability
• Voting ability

Whether I get round to it is another matter! It would be nice to have something that is built to order than something that's been bodged to fit.