There’s an old joke about a programmer that decides to write a book, so he goes through and buys a printing press, selects the typeface, buys a binding machine, searches the world over for just the right paper with just the right color, and after getting all of that stuff set up in his basement, realizes that he has nothing to write about.

Blosxom was like that: it was so easy to get caught up in novelty of setting it up and modifying it that it distracted me from actually writing about anything. Not that Blosxom wasn’t great — it appealed to me immensely, with a very sparse and elegant approach to a blog. The problem is that while I like “sparse” and “elegant,” it becomes slightly more of a pain when I need to add trackbacks or on-line/e-mail article submission or anything else that wasn’t in the basic Blosxom set, and it turned into a timesuck. Things were not made easier by the fact that I’ve been working in Python lately, and as a result all the Perl has leaked out of my head.

The other thing is that Blosxom is really kind of a side hobby for the developer, and, as a result, does not get updated very often; it may in fact be completely stalled now. So, time to move to a different piece of software that is maybe larger and less elegant, but also doesn’t demand most of my time.

Nonetheless:

• Modified the “find” plugin to show relevant context (i.e., not the entire story) and highlight the matching search terms
• Wrote sideblog to automatically parse the “links” directory and show them in the sidebar
• Modified “entriescache” to parse canonical date format (i.e., 2002-10-01).

Okay, this is it. I’m only touching .txt files for at least a month.

I think that a blog is like a toy, really, and it’s just one of those things that people do, like puttering in the kitchen or making model boats. How many times have you gone to a site and seen that it’s made a redesign, even though the old one was perfectly reasonable? One can imagine a blogger that was publishing a book through a dead-trees method:

Public: How is the book coming along?
Blogger: Oh, it’s great! I switched to a different font for the text and chapter headings, one that is much cleaner and easier to read. I did a Keyword-In-Context index instead of an ordinary index, that will make information much easier to find. What else? Oh, yes, I added a glossary and changed the color scheme of the cover.
Public: It’s almost done, then?
Blogger: Oh, no, I’m still midway through Chapter 2. But it’ll look really good when I finish, there is no doubt about that.

At any rate, after using Blosxom for a week, the following stand out:

• Still love that it’s so small
• I like being able to use my editor rather than having to type in a weblog-hosted input field
• Builds dynamically, rather than requiring MoveableType-style rebuilding of the entire site (there is the option of building statically, but I don’t use it)
• There should really be a default installation. I’ve been adding plugins and having to modify them all over the place just to get (what I consider to be) basic weblog functionality. More of this stuff came with MoveableType.

More on default installations. The thing is, my Perl is a little rusty; partly, this is due to the nature of Perl, which has a syntax so counter to naturalness that it requires relearning if you don’t use it for a couple of months. Java I will probably remember in the old-folks’ home, but Perl will be forgotten twice by my next birthday.

I think the simple and austere nature of Blosxom is, in the end, the thing that prevents it from widespread acceptability. It is really a hacker’s toy, not something that is relatively easy to set up. To make a basic site, you have to change the main CGI file — okay, probably not too hard. But once you start making your weblog, you have to deal with tons of issues, and sooner or later you are going to end up staring at three lines of regular expressions in a plugin, trying to figure out how to make it work.

For example: in figuring out how to put images in stories, I ended up having to modify extensively the regexes in a plugin and change my .htaccess — really, it seems like an inordinate amount of work just to get images to work. This isn’t the only example, either — there have been two or three times this week when I’ve said to myself, “Why isn’t this easy? Why isn’t it obvious?”

But, when it’s running, it’s very sweet.

Installation was quick but complicated by the fact that a) I uploaded blosxom.cgi in binary mode, causing a “premature end of script” error when anything was done, and b) when I uploaded the plugins, I put a CGI extension on them — out of blind habit, I guess. The plugins do not work if they have an extension, but this was only obvious to me after I spent the time debugging it with:

sub head {
    ${$_[2]}.= "more output here";
}

… all over the place. The thing with Blosxom is that several times already I’ve had that “this-is-incredibly-frustrating-I-know-I’m-being-stupid” experience with it — usually because I look at the meager documentation and not at the Perl code. For example, I added the hide plugin in order to hide the colophon from the blog list… yet couldn’t get it to work… tried it again… and again… until I finally I figured out that, contrary to the Perldoc, the hide file needs to be specified as a regexp against the entire filename. So, for example, to exclude the “aboutme.txt” entry that is in your datadir, you need to specify:

*/aboutme.txt$

specifically, the following will not work:

aboutme.txt

Argh. Incredibly frustrating before, incredibly embarrassing after.

Other things that I ran into:

Use the test plugin at the start just to make sure that you really do have the plugins working. And, if they aren’t working, make sure that you weren’t an idiot like me and put an extension on them.

To enable breadcrumbs, just put $breadcrumbs::breadcrumbs in your head.html file in your datadir. That’s all that needs to be done.

Writebacks can be done any number of ways, but I just went for the easiest: use interpolate_fancy, and put the following in your story.html:

<a name=”writeback”/>
<?$path_info unlike=”(^[^\.]+/?$)|(^$)|(index\.\w+$)”>
$writeback::writebacks
</?>

This includes the writeback if and only if the individual story is being shown. Put a link to the permalink + anchor in the story.html:

<a href=”$url$path/$fn.$flavour#writeback”>$writeback::count comment(s)</a>

And that’s all you need to do…

The current plugin list:

• breadcrumbs
• calendar
• entriescache
• find
• hide
• interpolate_fancy
• meta
• seemore
• writeback

Blosxom is highly recommended if you want a small, elegant blogging tool.