[web] Inserting blogs

Define "blog".

If he just wants to be able to write some articles that get posted to his website then it's easy to write it yourself. If you need a blog with all the full bling bling like track/pingbacks (with autodiscovery), comment system, etcetera, then you're probabely better off trying to integrate an existing application like WordPress. You can build it yourself ofcourse (I am, for the fun of it) but it's loads of work!

Yes, the "write it myself" option has come up. But the timeline is extremely limited. Of course, this is pending another conversation and just how interested the client is in more work, et cetera. For the purposes of this discussion, let's just say I have less time to devote to the project than you think.

That said... there really wouldn't be much in the way of features; I doubt even commenting or the like. Maybe the best way to put it would be "end-user-based textbox-to-html dynamic page".

In that case I'd write it yourself (if you're reasonably experienced with PHP or ASP). Wordpress and the like are pretty big applications all-in-all. You'd probabely spend less time writing a simple script from scratch than you'd spend trying to integrate a standard blog aplication. A few hours at most I'd say, if the current website provides enough of a base to build on.

However, most of the dynamic content in WP is accessed through simple calls.... so just make a design and then integrate the needed WP functionality. You can do the latter part in a few hours (i.e. quite simple).

Have a look at NewsBruiser. It's a lightweight program that's easy to set up and should be easy to customize.

You simply can't write a decent web log program in the time it takes to set up a prebuilt one. Perhaps with Ruby on Rails if that's available, but it's a pain to set up if it's not.