Setting up this blog took a small amount of effort because it's hosted on a Debian stable system. That meant building the blosxom deb in a stable chroot [debootstrap is incredibly handy for something like this] and then installing it. It has minimal dependencies and the only thorny one I fulfilled using equivs to tell apt not to worry about giving me an httpd.
Then I wrote flavour files so blosxom would generate two variants. publicfile doesn't know how to handle .xml files so that became .text=xml and I added a .text=html for xantha and other readers who prefer an inverted color scheme. [Yes, I do realize the mouse-over color in the xanthatized version is horrible and I will fix that soon, it's a legacy of my simple minded inversion.] An hourly cronjob parses the .txt files I write [I long ago got past the suffix == filetype mapping but it was the blosxom default so I use the convention] and outputs them in the tree where I told publicfile to serve from in the three flavors I want.
The biggest annoyances have been in modifying my templates and the plugins I use to append / after their paths. Publicfile is adamant about wanting it there to find the index.html underneath and blosxom's default templates and the plugins I've found all neglect to do so. Of course, some plugins are absolutely unusable because they require CGI but I can live without them. Who needs writebacks, anyway?
posted at 11:02 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link
