title: How To Write a Blog Engine in 20 months Or Less
tagline: What is a blog?
date: 2023-06-01 15:47:02
tags: meta
---
#h1 $title

The minimum viable blog is one or more webpages with the date in the URL, an index of those pages, and an atom/rss feed.

1. I know how to write a webpage, so that's easy.
2. Putting dates in the URL is also easy; I control the filesystem on my server.
This post will be at [/blog/23.04.16/Blog-1.php].
3. Writing an index is slightly more challenging, but I already did it once for
[files:/c/]. This index will need to extract some different information but it's
not like it's that challenging.
4. Making an atom/rss feed is basically like making an index, but using XML
instead of HTML. 

Even easier than that would be to just set up WordPress or a static site generator or something of the like.

Unfortunately I am incapable of producing minimum viable products because I am
too much of a perfectionist. And it would probably be a pain to make a static site generator work with my hand-written CSS. Which is why this wasn't published on January 12th. So instead of writing a blog in 20 minutes, I'm writing a wiki engine in 4 months, then writing my blog in that. Though most of that is just downtime, of course.

Maybe in time I will even rewrite my custom wiki engine in Vellum.