There is no Web application easier to write than a weblog. At its most basic it’s a very uncool Web 1.0 guestbook, except that only some people are allowed to sign it. No wonder Rail’s happy intro screencast is Creating a “weblog” in 15 minutes (snark-quotes ours).

I considered cribbing the trick for Databinder, but it’s just so boring. Our own “look at how easy” screencast shows off server-rendered text, something no Ruby-based toolkit is going to be able to do any time soon. It’s still kind of boring, but at least we don’t call it “Creating Adobe InDesign in 15 minutes!”

I’ve spent more than 15 minutes making my actual weblog software, and now it has an actual RSS 2.0 feed. It uses the Rome feed toolkit. Aside from its dobule-wide structure of do-nothing class interfaces (which is beginning to feel so 2002) and checked exceptions (um, sooo 1998!), the API doesn’t try to make feed creation any harder than it should be.

At first I was thinking I would need to serve the feed directly, but it fits perfectly into Wicket’s DynamicWebResource . What wouldn’t fit in that wonderful little container, I wonder? It’s charming that Wicket has such a flexible freighter for data.

If anyone wants to see my slapped-together Wicket RSS feed generator, the source is checked in. Eventually the class behind that link will be factored in into a hierarchy of resources serving Rome-generated data.

Coming up: Inventing the spoken languages of the world in 15 minutes (where I add comment functionality to the weblog).