Blog Building for Fun and Learning! (Dev-A-Day 0x04)

Yes I know, I just got this blog, but I immediately noticed issues and had concerns with WordPress security, and there are a lot of things I’d like to change that WordPress makes a pain in the ass, so why not build something new?

Obviously, I’m not abandoning this blog. I’ll still be doing research and writing on this blog semi-daily, but in the meantime I’ll be building my own so I can have a bit more control over the analytics, ads, layout and customization features, as well as to get a feel for how it’s done. I think it’ll be fun!

This post won’t be super code-heavy, I’ll mainly be detailing my plan of attack, what features I want in the blog and how I plan on going about it, and by the end of it I’ll have a solid MVP to go off of, as well as a Trello board to track it all.

On to the features!

Feature List

• Home page feed – The feed on my current home page looks horrific. I’ve done a little theme shopping and none of them look really good. What I’d really like is a home page that’s relatively easy to customize so that if I release something big, I can make it stand out from the other posts on the feed. This feed will include all of my posts in a default or custom format, as well as an area to sign up for my newsletter. Speaking of which…
• Newsletter – So, I have the MailChimp plugin on my page to allow people to sign up for a weekly newsletter. Given that I only get a couple dozen viewers a day on this blog, it’s off to a slow start. I would like to build out my own, stripped down version of MailChimp so that I don’t have to hand my viewers’ data over to another company. MailChimp also has some crazy pricing structures to get to premium features, so making my own might be worth it and I can customize and prioritize the features to fit my need.
• Projects page – So, I’m working on all of these projects, and it would be really cool if I could leave live, beta versions of them up on my site for people to tinker with. For example, having a beta version of the Day Trading Journal up on the site for people to play around with and suggest features for, etc. That’s not something that I could do super easily with WordPress in the way I currently have it set up.