I'm excited to announce a new open source blog platform targeted at software developers. I call it clob. I keep getting platform fatigue and constantly bounce between different products when it comes to blogging. As a developer, I love reinventing the wheel, so thought why not create my own? Hence, clob was born.

Why is it called clob?

A CLOB, or Character Large Object, is a data type in some database systems used to store large amounts of character data. Seeing as how blog posts are typically stored in columns of this type, it seemed fitting.

(Ironically, the databases clob supports don't actually call these data types CLOB)

What does it do?

It displays a list of blog posts and when you click on one you can view it. Amazing stuff, I know. It has share links that are a bit more relevant to a developer like Hacker News and Reddit. Oh and they don't include 4 gigs of JavaScript just to show that nobody has liked your post or retweeted it. It displays code listings in a reasonably pretty way.

More importantly for me, it gives me a simple way to manage my blog posts. I like to write posts in Markdown, so I just add it to a big textarea and that's my writing done. It also gives me some options around previewing posts, publishing them at a future date and setting some super magic SEO tags so I appear on the eighth results page for some semi-relevant keyword. Go me!

What does it look like?

Erm, you're looking at it right now. Really, this blog post was written in clob. How meta of me, annoucing clob using clob.

You want to see the admin interface? Prepare to be amazed...

Oh, and my editor is just insane altogether. It's basically a <textarea>.

How do I use it?

Erm, you're using it right now.

...

Oh, you mean you want to actually use clob for your own blog? Really? Are you sure? There's a far less sarcastic set of instructions on the GitHub repository. You see, I can write like a boring bastard when I need to, too.

Stop pointing me to GitHub, surely this blog platform has its own website?

No, actually. That would be just too meta altogether. Given clob's stage of development, I'd probably end up outsourcing development of a clob website to a WordPress developer.

Alright, alright, I'll make a website for clob soon enough. You'll probably find it on https://clob.io sometime in the next few weeks.

Where do I go to beat you with a giant stick for wasting your time on this crap?

Twitter would seem to be a suitable medium for such abuse. You can find clob there @theclob. Alternatively you can go to our echo chamber on IRC - the #clob channel on Freenode. Chances are though that noone is actually there and you'll find yourself having a wonderful conversation with ChanServ. Have fun!