I like your blog home page because it’s the cleanest design I’ve found without being excessively simple. The blurred / moving photos on top is slick and a very good idea to spice up a theme such as this.

I see the difference with your archives (did you notice I haven’t yet fixed the thinkMoult archives template?) as well as the featured, but the rest do seem quite hidden away in the backend.

> More than anything I want to quickly edit stuff in PHP and I feel more comfortable with my own code than anybody else’s when it comes to modding/hacking.

Definitely! WordPress has an absolute nightmare of a codebase if you ever try to do anything out of the ordinary. Nothing beats a custom solution – if you have the time (and in hindsight, skill too) of course. For that reason (the time reason, that is :P) I’ve cut out all templating in my installation as well as recoded the pagination system to meet my needs.

1. Lightweight code base (around 500-600 KB)
2. No templating systems – just PHP in XHTML
3. SQLite database – much more simple/painless than a client/server db – easier to take backups
4. Simple admin panel
5. No extraneous functions like file uploads – what else is SFTP for? ;)
6. My own method of archiving posts – take a look at my categories/year archives for instance.
7. “Featured entries” – special posts that always live in the sidebar
8. Ability to sort posts based on creation or modified date.
9. And now planning on sticky topics…

More than anything I want to quickly edit stuff in PHP and I feel more comfortable with my own code than anybody else’s when it comes to modding/hacking.

By the way what do you think of my website overall? Does it have an integrated look and feel?

I’ve always been interested in people that develop their own blog systems – not because I think it’s a hard thing to do but simply because I don’t really see much need in having much more than the ability to draft, post, comment, and display posts. But that’s probably because I seem to have a very minimalist need for what I see in the blog (as you see on thinkMoult I’ve stripped out pages, tags, categories, as well as much of the theming capabilities that wordpress provides). I do however appreciate how apps like Blogilo (KDE’s new blogging app) works with the xmlrpc file.

In short, I’d love to hear about exactly what makes your custom-make special :)

I have found the same thing with my own blog platform. Recently I identified another feature that *I* personally want and will probably implement it soon. Imagine the chances of getting a “obscure” feature like a “sticky topic” in a blog system?

The result is, my blog system is quite unique and different from any other “canned” solution you might find in the market out there: open source or otherwise.