Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom //at 02:10 //by abe

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives.

First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs).

But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit.

First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release.

The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-(

But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Comments

Re: Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom

Posted by:	Michael Olson
Website:	http://www.mwolson.org/
Time:	Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:01

I use PyBlosxom (http://pyblosxom.sf.net/) happily, myself. It was a bit of a bear to set up the templates, but I've contributed a working template (http://mwolson.org/static/dist/themes/pyblosxom-gray.tar.gz) that might make it easier.

And since you mentioned Emacs on your page: I use Emacs Muse (http://www.mwolson.org/projects/MuseMode.html) to publish blog entries to a Blosxom-readable form.

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Re: Blosxom like alternatives to Blosxom

Posted by:	Matthijs Kooijman
Website:	http://katherina.student.utwente.nl/~matthijs/cgi-bin/blosxom
Time:	Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:30

I think this is a know problem of blosxom, together with its lack of up to date documentation. I'm planning on fixing some of these things.

I think blosxom can be made a lot more powerful if the API is better documented and extended, without destroying the small code base and simplicity of it.

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