What does a Blog need?
 

What does a successful blog need, programming-wise? Like, I know you pretty much need RSS for it to be even recognized as a blog, but how should I make a blog?

Or should I just use wordpress or something like that? I figured that it would be better to spend the time I would use learning wordpress to learn to make my own blog.

Every feature Wordpress has, but if you want to take it further I'd add a smarty like templating class to make it dunce level entry.

Could you be more specific, like specific enough for me not to go to the wordpress site to look? The things you list will tell me what is really important, while 'everything wordpress has' is soooo general =(.

If you want to take my opinion as a consultant, I would say go with wordpress. You would spend many hours on a blog that doesnt accept the vast majority of templates and would have less features.

That will be $100, please.

I'll play opposite of that.

The whole damned web has gone Wordpress. I'm sick of seeing Wordpress. Do something original. :)
-m

I don't like WP at all. Way to complicated to use. I just hate it.

As for features:
- Feeds (RSS, ATOM)
- Archives
- Manage pages with cp
- Commenting
- Plugins
- Sidebar things

There is no point to writing another blog, same thing goes for CMS... You are just wasting a lot of time. Yes you will learn some great things, as well as greatly improve your programming knowledge, but It would be better to spend your time learning wordpress or blogger or some more mature blogging software. If you want to write your own code, then write your own extensions and plugins. This will allow you to better the software for everyone as well as meet your every need.

I still absolutely hate WP. I coded my own blog not too long ago (www.EvanBot.com - Blog) it has some bugs that I haven't gotten around to fixing but it works and is a lot easier to template than WP!

I say go for it!

I wholeheartedly, completely, and irrefutably disagree. What if this had been the situation?

What if the guys behind Google said, screw it, Excite and Hotbot (who?) have the market cornered. Lets just use their search engines. What if the guy who invented PHP figured Perl was good enough? What if Adobe said, eh, create a photo editing software? But why? MS Paint and Jasc PaintShopPro should be good enough. AMD vs Intel. Should I go on?
-m

Heheh, I was going to say something similiar Delayed, I got his post in the e-mail and I disagreed as well, but for different reasons.

A CMS is wonderful and everything, but that branding doesn't look good for you. You don't want to reinvent the wheel, but making another one that uses rubber on the edges instead of steel is a deft improvement. Some blogs don't fit your requirements. It is sometimes easier to create your own CMS than to use and customize an existing one. May I remind you that there isn't a single CMS that I would use out there.

A custom vs premade application is just like a custom vs premade skin/theme.