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

Pisg User Manager released with pisg 0.67 //at 02:01 //by abe

With the release of pisg 0.67 this Thursday also the Pisg User Manager (PUM) I started has been released and become part of the pisg distribution. (See also Credits and Changelog.)

The days of addalias are counted — pum is coming //at 02:01 //by abe

Although it’s quite a while ago that I wrote version 3.0 (the initial version) of pum — the pisg user manager — and that it’s even longer ago that Myon and I decided that the current pisg user editing -ehm- web frontend called addalias needs to be rewritten from scratch or replaced, only now pum seems to get ready for the pisg community:

Myon asked me yesterday, if I could send him and Azoff a copy. So I did. When I today asked for feedback, Myon pointed me to Azoff’s WebCVS and I was quite surprised (positively) that someone continued my work on pum, added new pisg features and raised the version number to 3.1.

So today Azoff and me worked further on pum, me mostly fixing some of my own old bugs and typos. I’m sure, we’ll have a publishable version quite soon. So the days of addalias are counted…