prior art: the wheel

Friday, March 05, 2004, at 07:21AM

By Eric Richardson

Yesterday Topher outlined features he wants in a future version of the software he's written to run his blog. The first comment echoed my thoughts while reading: why? Why go to all the work of writing your own software when other packages already exist and do a great job? Then I went, oh, wait... I do that.

Granted, my reasons are a little different. I moved this blog to eThreads on April 19, 1999. Movable Type 0.1 wouldn't be released until September 23, 2001. Blogger predated that, but still didn't launch until August, 1999. So there really wasn't much else out there when I first made the changes to customize a version of eThreads to do news instead of forums.

But the core question is one that I still ask myself, a lot: Why should I not port what I'm doing to something like MT and just get in with the trends?

I think really my answer is that I just don't see a reason to. eThreads is for me a perfect platform. Over the years the architecture has evolved into something that's really fun to work with. When there's a new feature I want I can use some nice hooks to be able to plug in and make things happen really easily. A couple weeks ago I wanted support for XML/RPC pings to be able to ping blogrolling. Writing the code to do so in a clean, extensible way took a couple hours.

Were I starting from scratch, I'd definitely get on the MT bandwagon and start developing extensions onto it. I think they're doing some really cool stuff. But I'm not starting from scratch, or even looking at a situation where I need to add a lot of things at once. And in that case, I'm perfectly content sitting where I'm at.