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.<p>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.<p>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<p>With all that said, does anyone have thoughts or advice about building their own blog engine?
Try something new! Take a look at incorporating support for new IndieWeb technologies like Webmention or MicroPub - see <a href="https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks" rel="nofollow">https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks</a> for a list of tech.<p>I’m currently working on incorporating Webmention and MicroPub into <a href="https://etch.blog" rel="nofollow">https://etch.blog</a>
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.
You can learn a lot from explorations like this.<p>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.