I was checking out some videos online when I came across Mike Arrington's talk from Startup School '08.

One of his main points was that entrepreneurs should have a blog or website. It's the best way to interact with the press and media, and it lets you respond to any type of product review -- positive or negative.

This actually gave me the initiative to create a blog. But after checking out the existing platforms (wordpress, typepad, blogger), I couldn't find anything that was worth the effort. They all seem broken in different ways, but the common one is lack of personalization: when I create a blog, it looks too generic. Of course, if you don't like the default look, you can try a better-looking template with more CSS hacks, but then making modifications is more painful. Struggling with a wordpress theme is not my idea of time well spent.

The theming engines in these platforms generally involve editing the server-side PHP/SQL/CSS code. Blogger is a little better about this, they actually have a theme XML language, but who really wants to learn the custom blogger schema? All this explains why there's a market for professional blog designers (search for that in Google). But customizing a blog should be as easy as editing a word document, or creating a mockup.

Many people, it seems, are happy with the default themes. They really only care about transcribing their thoughts, and any blog platform solves that. But like Arrington says, if your blog is the center-point of your interaction with the community, shouldn't you be able to add a greater level or personalization?

I think so, which is why I decided to roll own. Creating a blog from scratch is a great way to exercise your favorite language, web framework, database, whatever. You only add the features you want.

And it was remarkably easy, because most web frameworks are built for this type of project. Plus, adding Disqus and FriendFeed widgets help with all the heavy lifting. The only thing you need to is store and edit the content, which is pretty trivial.

So the next time you're trying to decide between Typepad or Wordpress, choose neither. Roll your own.