Evenstar

evenstar is a dream, a dream that lets my imagination fly on wings of hope, hope that my prayers would be answered, answered with a gift, a gift that is worth everything I may ever be. They say necessity is the mother of all invention. For me, it has been the sucker of many odd hours at night leading to the development of a blogging engine. Yes, evenstar is a blogging engine! For the geeks and interested here are the technical specifications:

• Open-source Java-based blogging engine running on Google App Engine - so anyone with a Google Account can run it for free, yeah!
• Support for multiple blogs via a single instance
• Blog layout templates based on the powerful Velocity templating engine
• A post system featuring author-defined permission on who can view, what can be viewed
• A commenting system featuring various protection modes, on who can view the comments
• An author controlled post URLs - with default automatic mode aka Blogger style
• Integration with popular tools
• Wired with Google Authentication
• Integrated email notifications, RSS/Atom feeds
• Powerful user management - both for authors and viewers
• REST based open architecture - go build your own UI
• Ability to prettify code snippets - for the developer community
• Import previous blogs from popular systems
• Sanitization of incoming/outgoing HTML
• Powerful system to manage which posts are allowed to be crawled and indexed
• Integrated post-search honoring author-defined permissions

This is just a broad level of features planned/in-development. Drop your comments for,

• on thoughts over building this new system up
• for lending a helping hand in this intiative
• for catching an early-preview (sometime late Dec 09)

This is just a small peek into the dream of mine, and I leave it to you to find about the gift I seek.