I haven't really written anything for this blog in a while.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but I'm generally pretty sensitive to my tools, and I haven't been thrilled with either what I am currently using or what I might use in the future. Do I want to use Wordpress on a virtual machine at some hosting provider? Do I want to write something custom on AppEngine? Or one of a dozen dozen other choices? It makes me want to lie down.
It occurs to me that the tools we have available each do a large variety of things, and that there's no good reason for these functions to be bound together into one application. For example, Maciej's recent article on why not to have a public of Wordpress (and more details) shows that serving the website and editing it can be very separate pieces. The original ancient Blogger software also used to push a copy up to your site via FTP.
There are a number of separable pieces in the system:
Authoring - the actual role of editing a blog entry is usually just a big text field, but several tools use FCKEditor and other nice javascript-based editors. Google Documents could fill this role too. Current weblog APIs allow this part to be decoupled, for the most part, usually for desktop or mobile clients.
Storage - a simple database would suffice. Not much metadata is required, nor is complicated indexing. Amazon S3 and Google Docs both fit the bill here.
Templating - The system that turns the raw blog posts from the storage engine into the pretty HTML version. There's nothing that really fits this bill in the current systems
Hosting - there's no need for the system that runs the blog authoring and storage software to serve the raw HTML pages. Amazon S3 would also suffice here, IF it dealt with directory index pages in a useful manner. (Currently, a url ending in a slash cannot map to a document on S3, so far as I know.) RSS/Atom feeds would also be served from the same system.
Feeds - as standards change over time, it would be nice to be able add the appropriate functionality. Feedburner already does some of this.
Comments - there are several solutions for hosting comments outside the blog applications: Disqus, Intense Debate, JSKit, and so on. I think moderation outsourcing and aggregating comment behavior will be increasingly necessary due to spam issues. Nor do I think that publishers should own comments, but that's a matter for another article.
I wonder if there is a way to define loose interfaces between these systems so that they could both work together but also not set APIs in concrete solid enough to stop innovation. Because the various pieces of the systems currently are all tightly bound together, it is very hard for the parts to move forward separately. For example, I've wanted to be able to specifically reply to comments in place in a visually differentiated way as the publisher, rather than just as another commenter. But this feature hasn't emerged, and if I hacked it into one platform via plugins, I'd be stuck with it forever.
It would also be nice if these systems could work together without all being client-side embeddable widgets. This usually slows down page loads tremendously.
What else have I left out?