Well after about a week or so of messing around, I have my first working version of BlogFile up. And you're looking at it. Right now. Impressed?

Probably not, but that's because you don't know yet what it's all about! BlogFile is my project to produce a simple blog that installs and runs off a single PHP file.

I figure that Wordpress is full of bloat that I have no use for. I don't need to manage 50 odd users, editors, and authors. I'm just one person. Why does my blog, which is meant to be mainly text, need a massive framework with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, surrounded by megabytes of images and javascript?

It doesn't

So I built BlogFile over the last week in my spare time between actually getting paid for work, flying from Europe to Australia, and fighting jet lag. I'd estimate that I've put approximately 30 hours into it, so far, and I'm pretty happy with it's capabilities.

The code (at this point) is approximately 3000 lines in a single file, including whitespace, html templates, comments, and the installer (which gets pulled out of the code base once it installs). I built a (basic) template engine, because smarty/PHPTal/whatever else is too much.

Due to the fact that there's no images and no javascript, the download size is actually pretty compact, which means that it should work quickly on low-bandwidth devices. I'm not a designer by any means, but I've done my best to make a clean, simple interface which doesn't look too horrible. I'm making use of a bunch of CSS3 and HTML5 elements, so who knows how well it'll work in Internet Explorer*?

So there we have it. BlogFile is running, and out in the wild. Fork it on github, try it, give me feedback, replace all your blogs with it, whatever. Let me know what you think.

• It'll fall back and look a little blocky, but otherwise be fine. I think.

P.S. I've ported some of my old posts and comments over from my drupal site, so don't go giving me that "It's not new - the old posts prove it" rubbish.