The world does not need another blogging engine, and yet I continue to write the stuff in my free time. I really don’t do it because have any notion of writing the “next great bit of blog software.” In a way, I do it for practice.

When I hear about some new-fangled technique for say rounding corners, or perhaps I discover a nifty little trick for ajaxifying permalinks, I like to have a safe place to test it out and play with it a bit. Rather than forcing those for whom I work to endure my sifting and winnowing process, I inflict it upon myself and let my own personal weblog suffer the consequences.

Since I started blogging in 1999, I’ve averaged writing about one new complete blogging engine per year. This post is the first post written in the new Motivated Hamsters. It builds upon the last verson of MH, but it’s also a bit of a throwback. At the core of it, the new MH is about letting me post how I want to, and where I want to. It integrates with Flickr and del.icio.us so I can tag and post my pictures and links once, and then bring them over here for display on my blog when I want to. Likewise, though no APIs were harmed during the process, copying and pasting a single URL will let me post a video from YouTube to my site. It makes posting easy, which (theory goes) will make it easier to post more often.

And if I don’t post more often, I assure you it’s because I just started writing another blog engine.

Note: There was supposed to be a neat little feature to MH that worked with Ferret to provide all sorts of “related posts” functionality. That’s still coming, but I’m having trouble getting it to work in production on Dreamhost. Soon…