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I was just going through some old posts to see what else I’d written on Pachyderm, and noticed that there are several posts that have munged “Read the rest…” links.

Looks like when I exported everything from Blosxom to the MovableType archive format for importing to WordPress, long posts got clipped. I’ll have to dig out the original source .txt files from the Blosxom incarnation of my weblog and fill in the blanks. What a PiTA.

It’s either going to have to wait for a while until things slow down a bit, or for a time when I need something banal and mundane to chew on while I try to figure something else out…

I’m not planning on leaving Blosxom any time soon, but if I was to switch (again), I’d move to Wordpress. It’s getting to be a great package, with solid plans and active development.

Assuming I ever decide to switch, there is a HOWTO describing how to get posts from Blosxom (individual .txt files in folders) into Wordpress (MySQL). It involves a custom Blosxom flavour that spits out a standard MovableType export file, which can be read by Wordpress (and many other weblog packages, actually).

Always good to have options…

UPDATE: Just did a test install of Wordpress on my TiBook. Took under 5 minutes (most of that was actually downloading the files and figuring out where to put them). Took about that long to configure. And about another 5 minutes to export all 400-odd posts from my Blosxom weblog and import them into Wordpress. It worked very smoothly. The only wrinkle is in the translation of the hierarchical categories. Looks like I’ll get to touch each post to verify all proper categories are set. Not rocket science, but will likely take an hour or two if I ever switch. Oh, and comments don’t make it through the stargate, but that’s not such a bad thing…

I was thinking a bit over the weekend about modifying Jay Allen’s awesome MT-Blacklist plugin to work with Blosxom. I just did some googling, and searching of the Yahoo Group for Blosxom, and came up with Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam.

It’s based on the MT-Blacklist plugin, and uses the same blacklist.txt file. It even merges in email notification of new writebacks, making my own wbnotify_nosendmail hack unnecessary and redundant.

If you’re thinking of using Blosxom as a weblog in a public space, do yourself a favour and grab BlogSpam. It replaces the default writeback plugin, and only requires some minor customization. (I added some additional stuff to quote the name in the sender’s email address, and to use a specified mailserver rather than localhost - I’ll probably do some other minor modification to tweak the output message as well).

One thing I couldn’t get working as per Doug’s instructions was the automatic update of the blacklist.txt file using his perl scripts. It’s easily cronnable without using Perl, though… I’ll likely just have it curl the latest blacklist.txt file into place once a week or so…

I was frustrated because the Blosxom wbnotify plugin wouldn’t work if you don’t have sendmail enabled on your host. I don’t have it turned on on the commons webserver, so writeback notifications failed.

As my first Perl coding ever, I modified the wbnotify plugin by Pasi Savolainen so that it uses the Perl module Net::SMTP rather than sendmail.

After some tweaking (mostly because I can’t seem to hit the right keys to save my life today. Come onMotrin, do your stuff), it’s working, and happily sending notifications of new writebacks.

If you are in a similar situation, feel free to grab a copy of wbnotify_nosendmail for yourself. It needs some minor configuration before it will work (you need to provide a destination email address, a sender email address, and the location of a machine with SMTP that you want to use).

The current limitation of this setup is that all Blosxom weblogs on a single server (well, sharing a plugins directory, anyway) will send notification to the same account. Not a big deal, since this is the only Blosxom weblog on the server, but it may become a problem…

UPDATE: This plugin is actually quite redundant. If you’re looking for this, be sure to check out Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam - my thoughts on it are here.

Just threw the switch, and now this weblog is managed by Blosxom 2.0. I tweaked the HTML so it should be almost valid XHTML/CSS (mimicking the MT templates I was using before) - except for one minor bug where anchors include spaces, making this page technically invalid XHTML Transitional. Not a big deal for now.

There may be some minor hiccoughs, like completely different URLs for post pages (but nobody bookmarked those, probably…). Both the .rss and .rdf feeds are present (althrough the .rdf feed is just a copy of the .rss feed for now - most readers should display OK, and I’m looking into a “real” .rdf feed (they’re implemented as “flavours” in Blosxom).

I’ve always liked the simplicity of Blosxom - it’s just displaying files and folders, which I can manipulate at will without worrying about breaking it. Backups? Just tar the directory. Easy peasy.

One of the cooler things that Blosxom brings to the table, since it’s just using a file hierarchy, is the ability to have nested categories, not just a flat list. And it can generate pages and feeds for any point of the hierarchy. Very cool, and flexible, and simple.

If it’s acting up for anyone, please let me know.

UPDATE: Just realized, since I’m using a script alias to trick you into thinking that /weblogs/dnorman is a real file, and not a cgi, the images I’d uploaded into /weblogs/dnorman/images/ are no longer valid URLs. I’ll need to fix that… Perhaps I’ll move them into my ~/dnorman directory and just use a BBEdit search-the-whole-freaking-directory search and replace to get the URLs fixed… Not a huge priority, but it would be nice to grandfather existing content into the new system…

UPDATE 2: BBEdit has let me update all image links in all entries throughout the entire blog. In under 5 minutes. I love BBEdit.

I’ve also added a redirect so that folks looking for the old /weblogs/dnorman/index_rss2.rdf file will be handed off to /weblogs/dnorman/index.rss - assuming your agent honours redirects… I just tested NetNewsWire, and it does (as do Safari and PulpFiction - not sure about other agents, but that’s good enough for me ;-).

Good to see Rael is still hard at work hacking on Blosxom. 2.0 is pretty solid, but some of the stuff going into 3.0 sound like it will be easier for multiple authors/blogs (like having config outside of the main .cgi, for one…)

Trying out Blosxom 2.0 to see if it can replace MovableType

It looks like it’s grown up a LOT since the pre-1.0-beta days. Quite fully featured.

I’m hoping that I can script a modification of the timestamp of blog entries, to the values saved by a handy-dandy movabletype-to-blosxom export tip. If I can do that, and if it can handle multiple blogs and multiple authors, then we’re good to go.

Well, dang. It sure is easy to edit stuff in Blosxom…

Now, to figure out how to have multiple authors and multiple blogs, or any combination thereof…

I’ve been playing around with some of the community’s contributions to Blosxom, and it looks like they’re going to fill in the “missing bits”

I’ve added the active category list on the right side, thanks to Michael McCracken, who posted instructions.

I’ve been trying to get searching and comments, but neither appear to be working correctly. Searching just plain pukes when activated according to instructions, and comments appears to be a one-way street: you can add them, but can’t view them…

There’s a Yahoo group, where they mention work on a calendar display, too. Cool.

Still, quite promising. I’ll keep playing around with Blosxom and see if I can learn some Perl along the way.

Just poking around on the Blosxom website, and came across a link to Blapp which is a standalone blog manager for Blosxom.

It seems like it’s rather complete, but a wee bit rough - good enough, though. It also appears as though it will support exporting of the Blog to static HTML, so I can publish on .Mac.

Very cool.

update:

Blap WILL publish a Blosxom site to any server, but it still requires Blosxom to be installed on that server. It doesn’t generate static HTML, but manages transfer of modified files to the remote blog location.

Blap is an open source project now, with a home on sourceforge

I’ve installed Bloxsom as my weblogging software. Installation went extremely smoothly, and initial customization went pretty well, too

I’m going to want to try to build a couple of things:

• Calendar view
• Search
• Standalone blog entry tool

Other than that, it seems quite well done, and quite minimalist (good in this case - MT is overkill).

The one thing I don’t like about it that iBlog offers is the ability to publish static pages that can then be dumped on any web server (like .mac, or whatever). I use a TiBook as my primary machine, and if it’s not online, the blog isn’t available - for what I do that’s fine - nobody’s supposed to be reading this anyway, except me…