Back when blogger was having a lot of technical difficulties (which is why I ended up creating this new blog in the first place), I toyed with the idea of rolling my own blogger-ish web publishing/journaling solution using PHP and MySQL. I finally decided to try it out and after two days of coding, I have all the basic functionality. I’m going to release it (maybe next week) as an open source project. I’ve already set up an account at SourceForge and invited my friend Steve to consult on the project. So far, what I have is a tool useful for maintaining a personal blog on your own server using Apache, PHP, and MySQL. It’s cool. I’m working on the authentication system right now. I hope to have a demo out very soon.
The point isn’t to replace blogger (I’ll probably continue to use it to keep my personal blog for some time to come), but to make a similar application that will work using only open source tools. If blogger ever shuts down or goes commercial, there will be another option. That’s my main goal at this point. The nice thing is that the same core functionality used in a blogger-type program can be used as the cornerstone of lots of web applications. For instance, as soon as I’m finished with the first public beta of this blogger-ish project, I’m going to use a modified version of it as an online technology work-request form. The guts of it will be, for the most part, the same, but I’ll add some other elements (like the ability to prioritize jobs and sort them by priority) to better suit the app to its new purpose.
