These are the goals I was going for:

Easy, fast login/registration

I want people to actually use my site and leave me comments. So I noticed that when I was looking at other people's pages, the best ones where the ones that either didn't require any registration or did so but didn't require any stupid thing like email confirmation. But the other thing I didn't like was feeling like I was commenting into a black hole. When I leave messages in other places, usually I'm never going to come back there again, so any chance for conversation is lost. I decided that what I wanted was a system that would email you when someone replied to what you said, like LiveJournal does. (Obviously users can opt-out.) So to meet both of these goals, I made an AJAX login where you just enter your email and desired password. The system automatically registers you if your email doesn't exist, and logs you in or gives you a "bad password" message if it does. I figured Javascript was okay in this day and age, but if people actually care, I'll add a non-JS version.

Easy commenting

The comment system is hierarchical, so you can have a conversation, and the formatting is done in Markdown. Basically what this means is that if you type *this* it shows up as this, **this** shows up as this, and so on. Also, you can edit your comments if they don't look like how you want.

RSS Feeds

Orginally, I wanted there to be like an RSS feed for everything - posts, comments, news, etc. But I got lazy and only made RSS feeds for the regularly updated sections. I made it so it's easy for me to update, too.

Caching

I'm on a shared server, and running a site using PHP, Smarty, and MySQL isn't the speediest in case enough people do see it. That's why I wrote a small utility that basically will cache dynamically generated pages, and is action-triggered, not time or update-triggered. That means that if you have a blog with a MySQL backend, you put the RenewCache procedure in the code to update the blog, and the idea is you can pass it a key so it knows which cache to delete (and consequently regenerate when the page is called). I figured it was a useful enough utility, so I made a SourceForge project, but I haven't put up any of my code yet (it needs to be polished).

So that's it! Please take a look around and please tell me if you break it!