Gordaen’s Blog

I’ve been developing my own blog software based on CodeIgniter in order to fill my few free minutes (though I’m also painting and taking on a lot of other projects; not unusual for me). I spent more than a week up front just brainstorming, thinking about what I want it to do. After that, I thought about how the database should be organized. It wasn’t until a while later that I started to look at the way other blogs did things and I realized how different my expectations were than what many blogging platforms offered. Some of the smaller names were closer, but I was not entirely willing to trust a new name to be going strong in two years.

First, blogging software needs to effectively combat spam. There are two issues here: 1) users don’t want that crap on their blogs, 2) when blogs are easy to spam, it encourages more spamming. The whole nofollow issue saddens me. Spammers aren’t going to avoid spamming just because it doesn’t directly help them with Google PageRank and similar systems. If spamming is easy, they’ll do it regardless and net a few suckers. Maybe a few of those suckers will even buy whatever it is or even link to it.

A blog’s approach to stopping spam doesn’t have to be as complex as what I’ve previous talked about, but it should do something. At the very least, generate IDs that require spammers to at least LOAD the page they are going to spam. I am amazed that so many blogging systems have little or no spam protection built in.

It should be extremely easy to upload media, especially images. There’s no excuse for making the user pre-size his/her image when the GD library, ImageMagick, and so many other tools out there. At the very least, a user should be able to set a default thumbnail size, whether full-size images should be resized (and to what size), easily upload a large number of images, and override any of the defaults (”This thumbnail would be so much better at 200×200 instead of 100×100…”). A blogging system that goes beyond the minimum would allow custom cropping and maybe even basic touch ups.

All blogging systems should be “self advertising” in the sense that they generate RSS feeds, create sitemaps, ping appropriate services and other blog posts, show post relationships (i.e., X post is related to Y post or the “If you like X, you might also like…”), and give the ability to subscribe to the comments on a post. It’s frustrating to find an interesting new blog, make a comment, and then forget to ever go back. One of the cool things about blogs is that they are more community-focused than a magazine article, so let’s work on that communication!

One has to be able to preview posts and comments, show code snippets, create excerpts, tag posts (I hate categories), customize links, search, cache, etc. Some of these absolutely basic features are still missing from major blogging software. Sure, they can be plugins, but in that case there need to be “official” plugins for these features pre-installed (with the ability to easy replace them with community-contributed alternatives).

What features do you find missing from blogging software?