BLEX
A publishing platform I built in 2019 and still use every day. Every post I've written lives here.
Why I Built This
In 2017, I was on Tistory, deep into customizing my blog’s theme. I’d spent the entire weekend tweaking CSS — and realized I hadn’t written a single post. I was building a house but never living in it.
That pattern kept repeating. Naver Blog, Tistory, Jekyll — every platform taught me something, but each one forced me to choose between convenience and freedom. Jekyll freed me from platform lock-in, but couldn’t handle the features I actually needed: comments, image uploads, real-time interactions.
So in 2019, I stopped choosing. I built my own.
What BLEX Is
BLEX stands for Blog, Let me Express. It’s a writing tool that gets out of your way.
I picked Django — not because it was trendy, but because I could ship something real with it, fast. Along the way, I solved problems that only surface when you’re the one using your own product every day. Converting GIFs to MP4 to cut bandwidth. Replacing GitHub API calls with server-side markdown parsing when I hit rate limits. Designing a flat comment system — no nested replies — to keep conversations accessible to newcomers.
Every technical decision came from real usage. That feedback loop — builder and user being the same person — is something you can’t simulate.
What I Learned
The most important lesson wasn’t technical. It was knowing when to stop building.
At some point I was spending more time on custom analytics dashboards and reinventing features that already existed as libraries than on the actual writing experience. The wagon had stopped moving — I was too busy polishing the wheels.
So I stripped out what didn’t need to be mine and refocused on what mattered: making writing feel good. A thousand No’s for every Yes.
Why It’s Still Here
Most side projects die after a few months. BLEX has been running for over six years. It’s not the most polished platform in the world, but it’s mine — and I use it every single day.
I didn’t build BLEX to impress anyone. I built it because I wanted a home for my writing that I fully control. And as long as I’m writing, BLEX will keep evolving.