Simon Willison’s Weblog

Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine. I couldn’t agree more. Weblogs are an ideal starter project—simple enough to get your head around, complex enough to teach you a bunch of important lessons, ideally suited for eating your own dog food.

Posted 20th September 2007 at 1:17 pm

Tagged dogfood, programming, weblogs

5 comments

Phew. I’ve been planning on making a blog my second (and first public-facing) Django project. I am now more confident that I’m not being an idiot by rejecting Wordpress/Textpattern/all the others.

pauldwaite - 20th September 2007 13:50 - #
The problem with that approach is that you are then required to compose actual prose to go into the weblog :) You should start off with a planet-like aggregator - it's much easier on your constitution.

Ryan Tomayko - 20th September 2007 15:49 - #
Good point: a nice thing about writing an aggregator is you have to learn that lanugage's HTTP and XML libraries as well.

Simon Willison - 20th September 2007 20:43 - #
My starter project for new languages used to be writing xUnit in a TDD fashion, after reading Test Driven Development. I'm now into porting the feedvalidator to new languages, which is a nice small problem domain. XML processing, HTTP (or sockets, depending on what's available). Pretty much what I need to use on a daily basis.
James Abley - 21st September 2007 22:11 - #
Your comment contains very useful information about all thank you. Your comment contains very useful information about all thank you.

japonca tercüme - 6th March 2008 12:40 - #