Alieniloquent

First off, I’ve decided on a name for my project: blogerl. I will be hosting the source code here on GitHub.

With that bookkeeping out of the way, I’ll get to the meat of the post. I want to include you in my brainstorming process as I figure out what my goals are with this project. In my next post I’ll brainstorm features that will help me meet these goals and select a subset of those features to implement initially.

Before I can start brainstorming features, I need to figure out an overall vision for what I am trying to build. So the first thing I want to describe is the primary goal of this system, and possibly some secondary goals as well.

I want a system that will manage the storage and presentation of my blog content. That content will be primarily textual, and may be annotated with various pieces of meta-data (e.g. date, title, or tags).

That’s pretty vague, and I can design several extremely different systems that will deliver on that, so I’m going to provide some additional goals, in priority order, to narrow the design down.

Adding or editing content should be easy.

So many blogging tools are a pain to use. I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of the web application. Especially not for things like writing. I intend for Omniloquent to frequently have essays, and I don’t really like doing massive amounts of writing in a <textarea>.

Viewing the website should be fast.

This isn’t usually a problem in most modern blogging tools. However, I’m writing this one from scratch, so it’s going to be a little less modern at first. I don’t want people to be sitting around waiting for my content to load. I want it to be snappy. The closer to static content it feels, the happier I’ll be.

Adding or editing content should be fast.

The converse of the previous goal: I don’t want posting to take forever. This is why I hate Movable Type. The idea that I should have to rebuild dozens of pages when I just update a single post is ridiculous. However, I am willing to suffer a little, as I recognize that I’d rather it take me a second or two to post but have the blog be lightning fast for my readers. That said, the closer to instantaneous posting I can get, the happier I’ll be.