From my very first blog, I have been using a custom blog engine. Never anything too fancy (or very well coded at that), but something that serves the purpose I want it to serve.

I started out with a slightly modified version of a simple blog engine. Nothing worked very well. Posts would fail to get posted on occasion for seemingly unknown errors. The code behind it seemed cryptic as it was very poorly written. Through many revisions of code, I have a much more functional blog engine.

More than anything, the beauty of writing your own blog engine is that you constantly revise it. As opposed to starting with everything you could ever want and a whole lot more, you start with what you need at the minimum. Then, over time, you develop features that you want. This keeps the overall blog engine simplistic which means less useless code that inevitably slows down your site.

In addition to the advantages in speed and simplicity, writing your own blog engine allows for infinite customization. Originally I chose not to use a common blog software package like WordPress because I felt that creating a theme for it would be too difficult. It's much simpler, in my opinion, to integrate the design into the blog engine as opposed to making them separate entities.

All in all, creating a custom blog engine allows for a simplistic, fast, and reliable blog that is easily customizable. As far as starting the creation of your own engine, just learn PHP and MySQL and you shouldn't be too confused as to how to begin creating a simple blog. Creating a blog engine could even improve your coding skills and conventions. Give it a try.