I built my own blogging software

This blog is now running on an experimental CMS I wrote myself using the help of Claude Opus.

I've been blogging since forever, and I've been hopping between blogging software ever since. I started out on Nucleus, then WordPress, finally landed on Ghost.

I love Ghost, but when the annual renawel reminder came, I was thinking to myself: can I build something myself? And how far can agents get me to achieve my goal? Not for the money (Ghost has pretty good pricing), but because I just fucking love building things.

It didn't take my long to come up with a very nice system, that's user friendly and fun to use. I call it Chirpie, but that name sucks, so I'll probably come up with something else soon.

It packs the things I love from Ghost:

• A Medium like editor.
• Simplicity.
• Newsletter functionality.
• Simple analytics.

And it adds some things I was missing:

• Custom post types for links, videos & quotes.
• Comments that don't require a log in (but do require moderation).

And it looks good underneath the hood:

On a technical side it runs on:

• Laravel 12 (which makes agentic development super smooth with the Boost plugin)
• React backend (Inertia)
• Blade templated frontend (complete theming system).

There's still a lot of work to do, and things can be buggy, but it's great to type this in something I oversaw. Once all the bugs are ironed out, I plan to release this CMS as open source.