Right now I'm using Fog Creek's CityDesk to generate this blog. While CityDesk is a wonderful tool for its intended purpose--allowing the, shall we say, "technically challenged" to maintain website content--its limitations bother me a little. In particular, its proprietary scripting mini-language is way too specialized for my tastes; it can easily handle simple web scripting needs, but then it hits a brick wall.

So, of course, I've decided to write my own blog software. (Yes, I realize that the world needs yet another blog program like it needs a hole in the head. I just can't help myself.) Actually, I didn't decide to write it as a result of CityDesk letting me down, particularly. I was just messing around with Microsoft's DHTML Edit Control and the blog software grew up around it by accident.

Like CityDesk, a simple WYSIWYG interface will be the input method for individual articles. A static website will be generated on disk, using HTML templates impregnated with Ruby code. Said static website will then be synced over FTP to your web server. (Sorry for all the passive-tense. I haven't named the software yet.)

Though the mechanism is, at a high level, almost identical to CityDesk, I am in no way attempting to create a competitor or substitute. CD lets you do some important things that I am not interested in tackling, such as organize your entries in arbitrarily nested folders, create multiple templates, "intelligently" manage links between entities within your site, etc. I currently intend to punt on all of the above. So my program will only really be useful for blogs, or other one-dimensional content.

The first of the three major parts is done: you can create, edit, and delete posts through a Windows Forms (C#) interface. I am using my own simple file format to persist the posts to disk, to make it easy to marshal the data into the Ruby interpreter.

Screenshots coming soon (not that they'll be very exciting).