Notes on the Implementation of a Blog

Publishing is currently a three step process consisting of writing an entry perfectly, publishing it to a staging point, and then committing contents of that stage point to the real blog. This causing me a small amount of grief:

• Links don't work on the staging site


• Comments are published to the staging site rather than the front page (this is not quite a feature)

Approaches I've considered to fix this:

• Just use Blogger as intended
  
  Not going to happen because of principles I'll explain some other time


• Rewrite the content as Blogger uploads it to the staging site
  
  A bit more tempting, although it's brittle. More importantly, it opens me up to all sorts of security vulnerabilities that I'd rather avoid in what should be a rock solid "deploy" script.


• Replace Blogger with something I write myself
  
  Now we're getting somewhere!

However, understand that when I say "replace blogger", I'm not starting from square one. Some time ago, I actually used a framework of my own invention based on a capability security model inspired by Richard Kulisz (don't ever tell me I didn't give credit where credit is due :p). The problem being that I wasn't following my own advice, and didn't have a backup of the material in a usable form when the inevitable happened. Ah well, live and learn, it wasn't that fun to work with anyway.

The idea here is to do it again, but with a focus on creating on top of that architecture that ends up feeling more like a blog than a wiki.

So, how do you create a blog on top of a CSM architecture? Why, I'm glad you asked...