Was just reading Tantek's post on why creating a weblog by hand is more satisfying than using a blog app to do the job. I fully agree with him -- and do the same for identical reasons, likening it to a craft. It's often a bummer to see so many weblogs using default themes that come with the application.

The only reason I built a weblog application was for the experience in doing so -- realizing that I could. But more importantly, it gives me an arena to play with stuff -- XML, Perl, XSLT, etc. And like Tantek, being able to quickly and easily change markup whenenver I want to experiment is key.

While current weblog authoring tools might add more functionality to this site, for me simplicity is king.