
Ask HN: Advice for building my own blog engine - backslash_16
I&#x27;m a software engineer and because of a lot of time traveling, have written a lot over the last six months. I&#x27;m wondering if building my own blog engine is a worthwhile project. All of the writing I have done so far is private &quot;posts&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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?
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alexmingoia
Try something new! Take a look at incorporating support for new IndieWeb
technologies like Webmention or MicroPub - see
[https://indieweb.org/Category:building-
blocks](https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks) for a list of tech.

I’m currently working on incorporating Webmention and MicroPub into
[https://etch.blog](https://etch.blog)

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mooreds
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.

~~~
backslash_16
No problem, you're not a buzz kill. I've thought the same thing.

Building a blog engine isn't breaking new ground and I might as well add
features to an existing engine, where I won't have to build everything from
scratch, and I can add/build any features I feel that I need.

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sarahfaulkner
You can learn a lot from explorations like this.

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.

