What's this “mango” of which you speak?

Mango attempts to make blogging fun again. Below are a few reasons I think you might like it.

Markdown

I've never met a WYSIWYG editor I didn't dislike, and writing in HTML sucks. John Gruber, a guy who knows a thing or two about writing, solved this problem a few years back with Markdown. In Mango, every document you create is simply a Markdown document like this one. Neat!

Rock-solid foundations

Mango sits atop Python and its wonderful Web framework Django (to which Mango's name pays homage). Django's so good at what it does that Mango's code checks in at a measly 2500 lines.

No database required

In Mango, documents are stored as — gasp — documents, not database entries.

And because you'll have a local copy of all your documents, you can say goodbye to the rigmarole of setting up cronjobs to e-mail you nightly database dumps.

Caching comes standard

Believe it or not, some blogging platforms do not ship with a caching solution. Uncached sites are like motorways: they work great when there's very little traffic, but fail when they're needed most.

Mango utilizes Django's caching API which supports a range of cache backends. I recommend the mighty memcached.

Use the tools you love

When did we agree that the best environment in which to craft content for the Web is a textarea inside a browser window? I must have missed that meeting.

While apps such as Daniel Jalkut's excellent MarsEdit attempt to remedy this problem, Mango circumvents the situation altogether. After all, Mango documents are just text files which you can author in your favourite editor: TextMate, Coda, WriteRoom, whatever.

Impossibly sexy URLs

To publish a document to /food/green-thai-curry/ you'd save it as green-thai-curry.text in a folder named "food". To get a short URL as well you'd call it something like 1=green-thai-curry.text, which'd make /food/1/ a short URL that'd redirect to the document's canonical URL.

As a bonus, because "slugs" simply reference file names, and because file names can be really long, your really-long-slugs-will-never-be-unexpectedly-trunca.