This is my take on “should you write your own blogging backend if you’re a developer”.
And the answer is…
It depends
You are a beginner blogger
If you’re a beginner blogger (and writing/blogging is your main intention) then I’d say: don’t do that.
Even if you’re an experienced programmer and you have enough skills to write full-stack blogging application, generating content is the most important part and that what you should focus on.
Writing lines of code instead of actual content might become a hidden way of procrastinating. It gives you this nice feeling that you’re doing something valuable (while in reality you should put your effort somewhere else).
Besides, there are things that you might be not aware of (like making your site accessible for search engines). Out-of-the-box platforms would usually handle a lot of things for you.
You’re an experienced blogger
If you’re a battle-tested blogger & developer and you need some custom feature that is not handled by any plugins within your blogging platform, then go for it - you probably know best if writing a custom backend is what you need.
You’re just learning to code
If you’re learning to code and you know that writing such application from scratch would be beneficial for your learning process, then it’s fine ;-).
Having a working and deployed web application might be a nice addition to your portfolio (even if blogging app is quite a popular idea).
Which platform would I choose?
I like static site generators and this site is built with Astro (with Astro Cactus theme). I’ve also used Hugo in the past and it was great.
If you prefer visual editor instead of markdown, you can always go with Wordpress.
(4/52) This is 4th post for my blogging challenge (publishing 52 posts in 2024).