Today at work I spoke with one of my colleagues about my desire to develop something to run this weblog on myself, and the reasons that were stopping me from doing it (originally written in this post). His response was incredibly clever: “Why don’t you develop your own blogging tool at your own pace, while blogging about it on something existing now?”. It’s good advice that I have decided to take!
A term that’s uttered quite often by software developers everywhere is that they like to “scratch their own itch”, and I felt the same way when I started looking at software for my website again. While there are certainly good blogging tools and content management systems and frameworks out there, none of these seem to be exactly what I want (often they do a lot of things that I don’t want, and they lack a few things that I do want). While WordPress is certainly sufficient for the time being, I know I want to make something that scratches my itch 
Most of the existing products that I have seen and tried are written in PHP (examples are: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more). Instead I’ll be using my preferred web application framework: Ruby on Rails. I’ll be using JRuby instead of regular Ruby, at least for development. I’ve heard good things about JRuby so far, using it for this project will give me a good chance to see how well it works.
As suggested by my colleague, I will be blogging here about my progress… so stay tuned
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It’s always fun to create something to your likings. There is another thing about developers though. They tend to create something completely new while there are solutions out there that almost fit the bill.
Instead of creating a brand new CMS another approach could be to improve / extend an existing (open source?) CMS. On sourceforge there are loads of existing systems.
That helps the other common issue with developers as well. They tend to never actually finish something. They start with everything, but after a while they get bored and move on to something else resulting in the next unfinished project on their harddisk
I’m curious about your view of your website CMS. I’m hoping to find more of that here later
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I thought of extending an existing piece of software… then I figured why I should spoil the fun?
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