peteg's blog - noise - blogging - 2006 08 09 Blosxom

Yes, I'm giving Blosxom a go.

/noise/blogging | Link

Venerable NTK had a link to Blosxom back in ... well, let's just say it was many years ago. I remember being horrified by such a masochistic use of perl and instead tried to do something nice in Haskell, a project which has become too time-consuming to maintain. The models are very similar, entry-per-file, but Blosxom uses the file change date to decide where it belongs in the index.

(That last point is resolved by the entries_index plugin that caches the date when the CGI script first sees the entry... necessarily stepping away from the pure filesystem-as-database model.)

I must admit I didn't think perl could be written this readably.

Somewhat annoyingly there are several conflicts in worldview between CSE and Blosxom, the main one being blosxom's view that plugins should not be in URL-able webspace, versus CSE's wisdom of forcing all CGI-accessible things to live in public_html land... but not to worry.

Somewhat surprisingly for such an ancient instance of the blogging program genre there's an active user group. The plugins are groovy and I'm sure they're as insecure as all get-out. How long will it take to get a healthy dose of the blog-clap?

Things to fix:

  • Archives, get rid of list bullets.
  • Categories font.
  • Get images working.
  • Trackback / comments.