Why do programmers write their own blogging engine?#top

Why do so many programmers write their own blogging engine nowadays? Or why do so many programmers write their own .. anything? Cal Henderson (of Flickr fame) gave a keynote "Why I hate Django" at DjangoCon 2008. In one bit he asked how many of the audience were working on blogging engines. So many people put their hands up, in fact that of those that didn't, he asked "Why aren't you?". This article attempts to answer a single question: Why do programmers write their own blogging engines?

Writing a blog engine is the new "hello world"

We all know what a blog is and exactly what a blog is supposed to do. The blog entries must be created, read, updated and deleted. This is a classical example of a CRUD application, which can be applied to almost anything. Therefore, many frameworks now offer tutorials on how to create a blog in their framework. For example, CodeIgniter offers a tutorial called "learn how to build a weblog in under 20 minutes" (QuickTime alert) and the CakePHP framework and Ruby on Rails have their own tutorials as well. It's the new "hello world"!

The blog domain is well defined and widely understood. Every programmer can, with time and (self-)training, create a blog. It's a great way to learn a framework, or to set up a framework of your own. It's a great way of learning a new web language. When writing a blog, you're almost sure to run into problems with the framework or with the language. Problems that are sure to occur in a lot more websites than just blogs. Writing a blog is a great way to get started with a new language or a new framework. It's a guaranteed success.

The perfect blog doesn't exist (yet)

After a decade of requirements gathering (since 1997), the perfect blog simply doesn't exist yet. And on top of that, no single one blog system is suitable for all bloggers. Some like a minimalistic approach and some like to have as much features as possible. This is one reason many programmers choose to write their own blog system. They can tinker on it forever making it the, in their idea, perfect blog system.

Programmers that find a technology they use constantly, can quickly become obsessed with it and get seriously annoyed at its flaws. They have a tendency to want to do better and fix those flaws or improve the technology. With existing blog engines, that is hard and not very fun, so starting from scratch in a new blog is a good alternative.

Because they can

All programmers are addicted to programming. Fact. You have to be crazy to do the kind of work that we do on a daily basis, and you'd have to have a serious addiction to obscure codes. Writing a blog, apart from the afore mentioned benefits, is something fun for a programmer. There are hundreds of ways a blog can be implemented, and plenty of features to include (or not). This gives the programmer so many design choices, that his freedom is almost unlimited. And if a programmer loves anything, it is unlimited freedom to do as he pleases.

In conclusion, we can say that there are a lot of real benefits to writing your own blog. Apart from being amazingly fun and relatively simple to make, it's something many programmers can use on a daily basis. The fact that you can tinker on your own blog into infinity is also a real bonus compared to large commercial services.

(Some) source and inspiration: Why does every man and his dog want to code a blogging engine? on stackoverflow.

Remote Media Center#top

I've started a new project yet again. It's the making a remote media center. One PC will be used to display content; Images and video collections mostly, but will probably include support for web pages and YouTube at a later stage. Another PC (my new ASUS Eee PC 901H with touch screen) will be used as a remote control. The content being displayed on the media center can both be on the remote control PC as well as on the media center or any other devices like a network disk or external USB drive.

Not unlike any other projects, I whipped together a working prototype pretty quickly. Thanks to this cool thing called ScreenToaster I put it on YouTube easily.

DI.FM Desktop Widget#top

I made a DI.FM desktop widget. Channels are read from XML so you can freely add and remove some. Application and source will be made available upon request (just put something in the comments or send an email / tweet). Has some cool smooth UI features.

Sweet alarm clock for EEE PC#top

I got a ASUS EEE 901 PC and made an alarm clock for it. This is in my startup folder, and will only run if my computer starts up before 10 AM. That way, I can lie down in my bed and when I am wake up (there was no option for start by alarm on the bios) I turn on the EEE PC and get all the essentials I need when getting up: The time, my school schedule and some sweet music.

I considered letting it show me some headlines, but I think displaying my agenda is enough to worry about when I wake up. It also plays DI.FM Chillout Dreams channel for ultimate pleasure. Here's a screencap:

Too bad the EEE PC was broken when I got it and I had to send it back. At least Yorcom offered a free replacement.

nping - Console network pinger / network sweeper / network scanner#top

nping.exe is a console line portable application that scans a network based on a supplied network address from any Windows machine. It is designed for system administrators and other people who are inclined to have need for a simple network scanner. This is finished and complete software. This is unlicensed. You can use it for anything you like forever.

Tip! Use the following command to write the results to a text file, you can then use a batch / AutoIt or VBS script to email you the results. It will place the results in a file called networklog.txt.
nping 192.168.20.0-100 > networklog.txt

Source file: nping.au3 (AutoIt file)

Download: