I also wrote my own last year. It was fun and a great way to learn some APIs I'd wanted to work with. I used CouchDB/PouchDB, Mustache.js, JQuery, TinyMCE, and

I also wrote my own last year. It was fun and a great way to learn some APIs I'd wanted to work with. I used CouchDB/PouchDB, Mustache.js, JQuery, TinyMCE, and a few other open source tools. I wouldn't say it was necessarily "cheap" since I built it on a $20 a month DigitalOcean server but when considered as an investment in learning it was a huge bargain. Personally, I like mine a lot better than WordPress. I think it's a lot easier to learn how to use and as far as "Looks Great", well, that's also something that I had to make happen so I went with using a Bootstrap template and while I didn't create anything award winning design wise with it I think it's at least pleasant to look at and usable, and it's easy to customize. I took mine a step further and set it up to let users create accounts and publish their own stuff there, so you could actually use it to blog if you wanted to. It's written almost entirely in Javascript so almost all the code is accessible. Check it out. If you want to set up your own I'll zip the code and give it to you with a GPL: http://ibloc.com http://ibloc.com