If you were writing a blog from scratch...

I don’t blog currently, but have had mixed experiences with various blogger etc. programs…Davey posted a similar question awhile back; here is the link-but I think it was more about getting people to read it versus how to redesign it.

I’m thinking of rewriting my blog as well (I use PHP/MySQL). I think It lacks some useful features like being able to save the article I’m working on as a draft and a tagging system. You haven’t been clear about the features your blog has so it’s difficult to recommend something.

Drafts are nice. The ability to have different ‘sections’ of a blog would be interesting. One section for talking about work, another for talking about life, etc.

Oh, and syntax highlighting for all of one’s favorite programming languages.

@juaniquillo: Well, my new blog doesn’t exist yet so it currently doesn’t have any features :). Seriously, though, I didn’t want to say anything about my current blog because I don’t want it to dictate (or maybe even influence) how I do the next one.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

as far as programs go…I like the squarespace.com interface. If you look around some examples there, you might be able to grab some ideas.

RSS feeds. Obligatory. :)

I actually just wrote software to run my blog. I did it for the same reasons you’re talking about, as a programming exercise and to have it work exactly the way I want it to (the big names all go overboard on features).

Here are the major features I included:

Public facing
* Topics: like tags, I assign 1 or more topics to a blog post and it shows up as a tag cloud in the nav
* Archives by year: I don’t blog often enough to warrant breaking this down by month
* Most popular: I track hits to each blog post so I can raise more popular posts up in the nav
* RSS / Atom feeds (as Vincentt said, obligatory)
* Mashup feeds: I pull in photos from Zooomr and links to recently read articles from Ma.gnolia

Admin interface
* No WYSIWYG editor! Hand coding is the only way I can be satisfied (obscure cinematic reference, anyone get it?)
* Live preview: this was really important to me as I code my blog entries by hand, it’s a faithful preview as I include the actual stylesheet used on the public facing pages
* Code snippets: I built a way to click a link and insert code snippets for things like embedded photos and code blocks

That’s pretty much it. What I love about it is that it doesn’t do a million things I don’t need. It does exactly what I want and no more.