Building a blog: what's standard?

I'm generally pretty new at web stuff. I wanted to build a blog from scratch to get some practice.

Few questions:

Do most people add new entries of a blog by directly editing the html or is there a more dynamic way of doing this that is used more frequently?

I'm assuming you can store the entries in some type of database and then display them via javascript or something similar? What are the most frequently used tools for what I'm describing? I know its about as simple as it gets, but like most things, I just need some tips to ge开发者_Python百科t started.

Thanks!

Most people install and use Wordpress.

Nobody edits blog HTML by hand. It's unusual to have javascript directly contacting a database - it's more common to have Python or PHP do that job and generate HTML that is served to the end user.

If you want to create a brand new blogging system from scratch as a learning experience, you might want to check out Django and Python as a base for your new system.

Many other people use PHP to build apps like this.

I prefer using a static generator such as Jekyll. I won't press it as "standard", but I believe that the pre/once-generated approach is often overlooked. For me the advantages of a tool like Jekyll are:

1. No additional DB server to setup/configure. On the other hand, if you want to learn about different databases/ORMs, etc, this is more of a detriment :-)
2. Can just SSH in and edit/create posts (easy markdown/markup formats available) with emacs. Note that this does not mean "edit the HTML" rather, one edits markup which is automatically generated into static HTML by a background job.
3. It's simple.

Happy coding/blogging.

As Paul said, it is not common that entries are directly written as HTML. Some blogging systems allow tweaking of HTML, but usually authoring is done using a WYSIWYG editor. There are lots of packages; one interesting alternative is Thingamablog, as it allows publishing of plain HTML so no database is required.

One other alternative is to create and host your own blogging site with Ning -- while it is much more than a blog; but does also come with a blogging system and the usual goodies (commenting). Simple version is 3$ / month (or 20$ for year); while not free it's not too bad for full hosting and ability to run your own ads (usually adsense). There's plenty of room for growth if you get lots of members, and more expensive plans have more features if one wants more integration options.