Hal's Blosxom Page
I'm using Blosxom
for my weblog.
Props to Rael Dornfest for this excellent piece of software. This
page is meant to be a helpful pointer for other Blosxom users. For
those who don't know, Blosxom is a super-cool, lightweight weblog tool
which makes it very easy for us Unix old-timers to post stories to a
weblog without needing any hardcore relational databases or a GUI.
You get to make a nice looking weblog and you can maintain it using
your favorite text editor.
The code
Download a copy of Blosxom here. This is
version 0+5i, which was the most recent available when I put up this
page. This does not include my patch - it is a
faithful copy of Rael's original.
A patch
Patch? Did someone mention a patch. I
was getting errors in my Apache log file, and this fixes them. In
short, an array variable was empty, yet the code was referencing its
zeroth element causing Perl to emit a message to stderr. This patch
just makes sure that the array is non-empty before accessing any
elements.
A tip - how to enable archive access
Next, a tip. At the moment (Oct 9, 2002) the documentation page on
the official Blosxom site regarding archives is broken. I had to read
the code to figure out how to let people access articles which had
fallen off the front page. It's really quite simple. Just add a link
(in your head.html or foot.html) to the Blosxom cgi script, with a
suffix. The suffix could be just the year, or both the year and the
month. It should look like this:
http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2002
(for archive access to all articles published in 2002)
or
http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2002/10
(for archive access to all articles published in October of 2002)
Another tip - minor security enhancement
Some paranoia. Blosxom allows the weblogger to have multiple
different themes for the weblog, based on filename extensions. Since
these were accessed through a CGI param() call in Perl, and since I
knew I only wanted one theme, and since I'm more paranoid than the
average bear, I removed that bit of flexibility. It's on line 51 of
the script, if you want to change that. Just hardcode $flavour to be 'html'.
Wed Oct 9 12:06:24 PDT 2002
eisen@dunhackin.org