Thoughts of Grails and blog software
I’ve been thinking about Grails again. There’s a very easy-to-use Grails plugin for creating RSS feeds (and Atom, and a lot more) for your application. I was surprised at just how easy it was to start from scratch and create an RSS feed from your existing domain model.
Seeing how easy using that plugin is, it made me want to revisit the idea of rebuilding this weblog as a complete Grails webapp instead of relying on Wordpress for everything. Nothing against Wordpress at all–it is an excellent blogging tool–but there’s something to be said about rolling your own and getting it to work. Call it a pride thing, or even just plain and simple hubris.
I’d have to consider a host of features that I currently rely on Wordpress to implement for me: posts (obviously), categories, tags, comments, spam filtering, RPC for remote posting via ScribeFire, RSS feeds for posts and comments, integration with Twitter, easy-to-use design templates, and so on. The list is huge when you look at it.
At the same time, if I write my own blog software, I want it to be full yet not over-flowing with options that it turns people off. I need to think about what a blogger needs from blog software and start from there. I can build up a set of basic requirements and start there. For instance, I’m wanting to aggregate a lot of my current points of presence on the web. It’d be nice to be able to go to one place and be able to update all locations, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Should I include support for RDF? OpenSocial? True restful web services for publication?
It’s a lot to think on.