When I first got into web development, one of my first projects was to create a custom blog for myself. Apart from the sheer necessity of needing a blog at the time, I embarked on this coding journey because I had read somewhere that developing a blog would provide a good introduction to the nitty-gritty of application design.

While this wasn’t 100% accurate, it also was not terrifically far from the truth. Through many struggles and achievements, I finally wound up with my own custom blog, complete with commenting system, RSS delivery, and eventually automatic posting to Twitter.

This modest blog served me pretty well for a few months, but I quickly outgrew it. I found myself pouring precious hours into little development projects to try to get it to do cool stuff that I came across in other, more robust systems.

Eventually, however, I ran out of time and motivation. First, the continual development stopped. Then, out of total laziness, important things like bug fixes and comment-security fell to the wayside. While I still loved to blog, the sheer effort of posting (my interface was a bit clunky…) was a big hindrance, so the posts became quite sparse.

Then I got my iPhone. More >