What makes a good blogging platform?

Leaving the tech details, feature lists and other bells and whistles aside, a good blogging platform’s primary aim is twofold:

1. Make blogging enjoyable. Entice the blogger into writing more articles.
2. Make reading enjoyable. The output of the blogging platform should be easy to consume. A good support for themes and customization is a must.

I had been using Syte as my homepage. Tumblr was the underlying blogging platform and the whole thing was hosted on Heroku. As it turns out, all three of my aforementioned choices were sub-optimal as far as my blogging requirements were considered.

Abstract Classes are one of the most useful and important concepts in Object Oriented Programming. I’ll attempt to illustrate their usefulness, and their usage in Python 2.7 with the following (seemingly contrived) example:

Let us say, you want/have to implement posting updates on Facebook using Python. Your code might look something like this:

1# Attempt 0: Bad code.
2
3def facebook_share_init(*args, **kwargs):
4    # Initialize OAuth with facebook
5    # ...
6
7def share_on_facebook(*args, **kwargs):
8    # Post to Facebook
9    # ...

It works and everyone is happy. Then one day, you decide to support posting tweets in your application. You add the following:

I was going through this link today when I could not help but feel an overwhelming sense of sadness and incompleteness.

I will be graduating in May, 2013 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi. The best 4 years of my life already behind me. As I was going through this list, I found a lot of things I wish I could have done, many others I wish I had done in a better fashion and many still that I have to do.