blog :: en :: computers :: blogs
Most of the new blosxom installation seems to be working now.
I've fixed up my old postings (both from Blogger and from an ancient blosxom installation on a previous home page), converting them to clean HTML, adding some meta information, and removing blogspot-specific cruft.
I have taught blosxom to respect Date: headers inside stories, as I don't like the concept of the time stamp of a file being the only record of the posting time. After all, a time stamp on disk is all too easily modified by accident.
I've also added some (very simple) support for tagging using the meta plugin. Internally, a posting might now look like this:
Title and description Tags: blosxom Date: 2011-12-15 14:54:47 <p>Post content</p>
Thankfully, Blogger appears to support redirecting the blog to an external server. I traversed the Blogger installation, checking which URLs are used internally, and added simple RewriteRule and RedirectMatch code for Apache to redirect to the corresponding blosxom URLs. This also covers tag search and date search. As I chose to install blosxom in static mode, "search" really means linking to the appropriate resource locations.
I am somewhat unsure whether to immediately support TrackBack. I have included the RDF code for postings for the time being, but have not yet activated the TrackBack server.
Last but not least, I have also integrated blosxom with my (mostly homegrown) content management system. This was a matter of a few lines of shell code.
All that remains to do is markup. I prefer a clean look, and this is a first attempt at it. RSS and mobile views are supported, the former automatically by blosxom, the latter by some very simple CSS magic.
Feedback is welcome. ;-)
posted at: 14:54 | path: /en/computers/blogs | permalink
Just thinking about whether this is all about style or what. Do I really want fancy style? If you know my home page, you know I prefer content over design. But if I should find myself in a situation where I've got too much spare time on my hands, I promise I'll make this thing a bit more beautiful. ;)
posted at: 23:50 | path: /en/computers/blogs | permalink
While my native language is German, I often have to write English texts. So what language do I choose for a blog? Obviously, I don't. I just use whatever language seems most appropriate for what I'm writing at the moment.
Now I realize this is probably not acceptable to whoever is reading this. So I decided to create top categories for different languages. If you don't like one or the other, just use the language selector to restrict yourself to articles written in one language. Agreed? ;-)
posted at: 23:47 | path: /en/computers/blogs | permalink
This is easy with the right kind of software.
blosxom is a simple piece of blog software. Just modify a few configuration lines at the beginning of the script, drop it into your cgi-bin, add a data directory, and you're go. To post something, just drop a text file into your data directory. blosxom will find it and display it. Add subdirectories to categorize your posts, or just collect all posts in one huge directory.
TrackBack by MovableType is a standalone trackback implementation. Just as easy to install as blosxom: Modify a few configuration lines, drop it into your cgi-bin, add a data directory, done.
I've also added two plugins to my installation: trackback_counts_display displays the number of trackbacks; autotrack posts trackbacks to the sites you reference in your posts.
To get the standalone TrackBack implementation by MovableType to work with blosxom, you will have to modify story.html in blosxom's data directory to reference tb.cgi. This is explained in detail in TrackBack's documentation, but here's my story.html for the impatient:
<p><a name="$fn"><b>$title</b></a><br />
<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="$url$path/$fn.$flavour"
dc:title="$title"
dc:identifier="$url$path/$fn.$flavour"
trackback:ping="http://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi/$fn" />
</rdf:RDF>
-->
$body<br />
<br />
posted at: $ti
| path: <a href="$url$path">$path</a>
| <a href="$url$path/$fn.$flavour">permalink</a>
| <a href="http://www.sedacon.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=list&tb_id=$fn"
onclick="window.open(this.href, 'trackback',
'width=480,height=480,scrollbars=yes,status=yes');
return false">TrackBack</a>
</p>
That's all there is to it.
posted at: 22:57 | path: /en/computers/blogs | permalink