I've used or tried a number of blogging platforms over the year, from WordPress to SimpleLog to Mephisto to Tumblr, even all the way back to Xanga. Each have their various benefits and drawbacks. So which did I go with for the newest iteration of my blog? Well, none of them. I rolled my own.
There's likely a number of different reasons for this. I'm a bit of a control freak in some aspects, and the idea of having to learn someone else's code to modify it or to deal with a different way than how I would do something is annoying. I have also floated around different languages, which accounts for the switch from PHP-based to Ruby-based platforms. Then there's the whole usability aspect... how I deal with the control panels, how I can stay on top of new comments, how expandable it is to support extensions to the code like an Akismet plugin.
After reflecting on this further, I've decided it's not really about me at all; it's really about how people understand software. What I was looking for was a simple solution to my problem of blogging. Once the solution was simple, I could develop ways to build off of that simplicity on my own terms. It didn't really matter that I was building the code from scratch; I just couldn't find software that fit that description for me.
That idea of simplicity points towards what's hip and trendy nowadays. 37signals builds super-simplified products that tries not to open too many doors. They step back and let their users forge their own doorways off of the foundation that they built. Reddit steps back and offers a clean and simple interface that lets users choose the news. Google won out over Yahoo in large part due to its barebones start page and obvious search box.
The two clear-cut examples of this are del.icio.us and Twitter. del.icio.us is pretty simple on the surface- add links and go. But from that people can basically build software themselves in order to track new links, track the blogs they've commented on, use it as a tumble log and syndicate those links on their blogs, and so on. Twitter is almost even simpler, if possible: write your thoughts in a short box, read similar thoughts from friends. With Twitter's API and the simplicity of the core service, people have built blogosphere monitoring services, sites aimed to track humorous overheard conversations, even traffic congestion monitoring services. These sites gained their popularity strictly because they were able to hit upon a simple solution that stood back from the fray rather than forced their users into it.
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For years, many have gone to Alexa for guesstimates on levels of traffic for an unknown website. I've never really subscribed to that theory (it's too easy to game Alexa, plus the normal Alexa-going crowd might different in makeup from site to site and topic to topic).
I was comparing a few differnet sites tonight in terms of quality, traffic, and all that good stuff when I realized that del.icio.us could help out in this regard. You can search for the number of people who have added a URL to their account via this string:
http://del.icio.us/url/check?url=URL-here
It's interesting to throw a few URLs in there at times. It's not going to give you hard numbers on traffic, uniques per day, or anything like that, but you can compare the number of URL saves amongst similar sites to get a feel for how a particular site does in its demographic. What's more, you can read a few comments on any given site to see what people think about it. It might be helpful to use in conjunction with something like Alexa to get a better snapshot of a website you don't know much about.