I posted version 1.0.3 of blelo. See the release notes in the distribution file for details.

Changes in Blelo 1.0.2:

• HTML entities are now escaped in the RSS feed, so the feed validates now (and Safari can read it).
• Recommended addition of the line AddDefaultCharset utf-8 to the .htaccess file.
• RSS feed URL is now http://example.com/blog/rss instead of http://example.com/blog/newsfeed.

Blelo to-do: there should be separate RSS feeds available for each tag. That way, someone interesting only in my posts about woodworking doesn't have to read my posts about chess. This should be pretty easy to do.

Blelo to-do: add some sort of type ahead suggestion auto-complete feature for the tags field on the new post form.

So, I wrote a blogging platform over the last couple of weeks. I call it Blelo as in tumblelog. This is still a fairly early version, but it's mature enough that it's useful. My motivation for writing my own blogging platform is that, among the existing open source blogging platforms, Wordpress comes closest to meeting my needs, but I've grown increasingly frustrated by Wordpress's bloat and security issues.

I wrote Belo with minimalism in mind for both the feature set and the code. I does include tags, an RSS feed, and some magic post auto-formatting. The README included with the distribution file should get you started if you want to play with it. Blelo requires Apache, mod_rewrite, PHP 5, and MySQL 5.