Relaunching with nodejs

So, over the weekend, I relaunched my blog on Node.js. I tried Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress (hosted and self), Django, Rails and was just about to rebuild it in Sinatra when a friend suggested I just build it in Node. Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

As for what drove me to roll my own blog when there are plenty of solutions that do it just fine, it was 1 part being anal about URLs (which Tumblr and Wordpress just wouldn't give me the level of control I wanted), 1 part wanting to serve up different types of content (ala Tumblr) and 1 part "why the hell not"?

As for the stack, I'm using Express for the framework, Jade for the templating, Markdown for the content and CouchDB for the document store. I'm using git to deploy to prod with the help of a little post-receive hook. I'm replicating my db locally to my prod box. This provides me with local copies of my site and my data.

I have a lot of things I want to do. I have gists I want to find a way to proxy the content for, I want to allow comments and am thinking of using Twitter for my OAuth provider. I want to host links as well as posts, with a nod to Jeremy Keith. Microformats. I love microformats and have none on the site. This will be remedied shortly.

I have a lot of things I need to fix. My content propagation isn't as clean as I would like. My design, well, let's just say it needs some love. Unfortunately, I don't know if I am the person who can give it that love. I tried to spend a good amount of time focusing on the readability and the font stack.

For anyone that happens to subscribe to my feed or link to my old posts, I apologize for the constant switching of URLs. One of the big reasons I went to this solution was to solidify my URL scheme. So I hope to be done with that. I will see about putting on some perm redirects for the old URLs.

Love it, hate or mildly ambivalent towards it, here it is. I have put both my content and my app on github for all to see. Check it out. I'm interested in your feedback.