The Unofficial Blosxom User Group

Blosxom 2.1.1 released

Blosxom 2.1.1, the "never trust a dot zero release" bugfix release for 2.1.0, has been released.

It mainly fixes two bugs:

Lilo von Hanffstengel noticed that the GUID in Blosxom 2.1.0 was not working as link and therefore isPermalink shouldn't be set to true. This has been set back to "false" for the default RSS story template. This won't change the GUID itself, but prevent it from being used as link anymore. That's what the tag is for anyway.
$url, which contains the base URL according to the documentation, contained the complete URL in some cases, e.g. when called from inside an SSI document. This has been fixed in 2.0.2, but caused the problem to show up in other situations. The (at least with Apache 2.2's environment) no more working manual base URL detection code has been rewritten. It has been made simpler and easier to understand. And it only applies if the base URL was not set manually.

In those rare cases where neither CGI.pm nor Blosxom manages to correctly determine the base URL, you can easily set $url in the config file to the correct value and no base URL magic happens anymore (except the removing of a trailing slash if present — as before). This closes issue #2032685.

Blosxom 2.1.0 released

In 2005 Kevin Scaldeferri took over the Blosxom development from Rael Dornfest and opened a SourceForge project for Blosxom. The final 2.0 release and two maintainance releases followed. The user mailing list has been moved from Yahoo! to SourceForge, a developer mailing list has been opened and the IRC channel #blosxom on irc.freenode.net has been established.

Kevin also managed to establish a solid developer base and the Blosxom Development Team grew to currently nine members from all over the world.

Although there were no release in the last two years, the increase in developers led to a nearly permanent development and also to a closer contact with e.g. the maintainers of the blosxom package in Debian.

So the Blosxom CVS repository nowadays does not only contain the CGI script itself, but also plugin-sets and a test suite for easier noticing of regressions. Kudos for the test suite go to Gavin Carr.

While the first few releases after Kevin took over Blosxom were close to Rael's code, the code has evolved a lot over the last two years and it's time for a new release with new features.

And here is it: Blosxom 2.1.0 has been released and features among others the following improvements.

New features

Support for external config files and multi-instance installations via environment variables. (Inspired and loosely based on the Debian patches for Blosxom 2.0.2.)
Support for multiple plugin directories using $plugin_path and @INC.
Support for configuring the plugins to use in a config file.
The default feed templates are now in RSS 2.0 format and prevent duplicated stories in feed readers or aggregators if posts are changed after publishing using a GUID element in each feed item.
There's now an encoding setting which controls what charset your blog and feeds should be marked as.

Bugfixes

Works together with a broader range of CGI.pm versions.
The number of false positives when trying to parse dates out of the path have been reduced.
Some RSS and XHTML escaping issues have been fixed.
The default HTML templates now conform to HTML 4.01.
Many small bugfixes and improvements.

Helpers for Developers

Test suite
Some code refactoring (including a .perltidyrc)
Easier building of tar balls for distribution

(Please note: The Blosxom Yahoo! Group as well as the blosxom.com website are deprecated and are no more resp. not supported by the current Blosxom developers.)

Using Blosxom as Feed Generator

Gavin Carr, one of the Blosxom developers, recently posted a simple yet somehow not obvious idea on his blog: He uses Blosxom to automatically generate feeds for software which hasn't feeds, in this case the network monitoring system Nagios, so that he get's all Nagios events delivered to his feed reader.

A similar yet local use of this idea is to let blosxom or a wrapper script be called by your feed reader directly. Liferea (GUI, GNOME) and Snownews (text-mode, ncurses) have this feature and there is already a big repository of plugins. The same way as those plugins are called, you can easily use blosxom as a plugin to those two feed readers so you don't need to care about how to generate RSS, blosxom does that for you. You just need to set the environment variable PATH_INFO to /index.rss before, e.g. by calling blosxom like this: env PATH_INFO=/index.rss blosxom.

That way I currently monitor the NVidia Unix Drivers Portal Page for changes, using this script, the libwww-perl (LWP), wdiff, a little bit of Perl glue and of course Blosxom. (In this case I use Debian's version of Blosxom which is able to have several configuration per installation by adding a -f flag for config files.)

The Blosxom Plugins Distribution is Coming

There is not only a lot of activity around the core of Blosxom but also at the plugins front:

The Blosxom developers are currently preparing the first release candidate for the Blosxom Plugins Collection. The collection will probably be available in different sets:

blosxom-plugins-small — for the purists, with 5-10 almost-core plugins
blosxom-plugins-medium — for the masses, with the 20 or 30 most useful plugins
blosxom-plugins-large — for the wasteful, with the entire set

Have a look at the CVS repository to get an idea, what's coming up soon.

Blosxom Development Excitement

In case you aren't subscribed to the SourceForge Blosxom Developer's list you probably aren't aware of a couple things...

There is strong movement towards getting the current working version of Blosxom up-to-date and ready with a set up "default" plugins. Basically this entails bug fixes, XHTML and Atom support and bits and bobs into the V2 code base. The plugin package would include a few highly useful and functional plugins that much of the community seems to use.

The second bit of news is a frank and open discussion on where to go next. Rael had tried and started on Blosxom V3 (you can download updates to V3 here) but the project fizzled. When Rael moved on to pursue other endeavours V3 was essentially dropped.

Now various developers are forming an idea of what they'd like to see in V4, which will ignore much of the ideas in V3 (let's pretend V3 didn't happen). The discussion has been going on for a bit, but if you want to hop in and contribute then peruse the dev archives. Then, if you think you've got some good ideas, join the list and get them out!

For a long time people have "lamented" that nothing seemed to be happening on the Blosxom front. Now it is, folks. Get in there and participate!

Old and New Annotated Blosxom Script

Quite a long time ago Frank Hecker annotated Blosxom so coders could get in and understand better what was going on. Now Rob Reed has done the same, but on a more massive scale, including a 160+ page PDF!

If you were ever interested in learning how Blosxom works, especially if you're new to Perl, then Rob's annotations might be just the thing for you!

Textile 2 Plugin

Barijaona sends us this news:

Here is the Textile 2 plugin for blosxom 2 which is absent from the unofficial plugin registry.

I haven't tested, but you should be able to replace the Textile.pm file with the latest one for MovableType which you can find at http://bradchoate.com/mt-plugins/textile

You can download the file here.

Wikipedia Trouble for Blosxom!

Thanks to "outdated and obscure" Blosxom user Britta we learn that Wikipedia had been thinking of deleting its Blosxom entry. As it stands the thought from Wikipedia is that the article needs to be rewritten. If anyone feels up to the task please get involved!

Blosxom Prime Site Moved

Already a while ago, Kevin Scaldeferri, head of the current Blosxom developer group, managed to get all the content from Rael's well known but neglected Blosxom prime site at blosxom.com online at the SourceForge hosted website of the current Blosxom developer group at blosxom.sourceforge.net, where the developers have access to and can start updating the content.

To really be up-to-date, it will take a while, but at least the content is there, since blosxom.com seems no more reachable, as someone noticed today on the Blosxom user's mailing list.

MT to Blosxom Importer

Gregory J. Smith wrote in to announce the availability of an AppleScript that will help you migrate your MT entries into a Blosxom blog. You can read about it here and download the script locally here (I merely copy/pasted Gregory's text into AppleScript, so I make no warranty or promises!).

UPDATE. Gregory wrote to say that you can always download the latest version of the script from his site. He's also said he might have a few more to post so you can look for those, too. :)

Stikkit Launching

Though not a Blosxom announcement, it is indirectly related. Rael Dornfest, the creator of Blosxom, has a new project called Stikkit (previously covered here). It will be launched on November 7th at the prestigious Web 2.0 Conference Launch Pad.

Congrats to Rael and his team at Values of N!

BlosEdit 2.0 Released

As announced to the MailingList from Peter Richard, shamelessly copied and pasted here:

BlosEdit 2.0 now features a modicum of AJAX goodness (mainly in Navigate webpage) and a revamped interface. The old blosedit 1.x series had only two webpage to do everything in, now we have four by splitting the main navigation screen into three (Navigate, Upload and Logout/Static).

With javascript enabled in your browser, you can select a directory simply by a mouse click on its name. The file list will be updated automatically.

Double-click a file in the file list and it will open for editing. A single click will select it if you want to delete it. If javascript is disabled then submit buttons appear to give you these functions (just like Blosedit 1.x)

When editing, you can change the save directory before saving. This is particularly useful when you include complex temples in your work. For instance I keep a templates for embedding QuickTime movie objects saved in draft mode so that blosxom ignores it. All I need to do its open the template, fill in the movie file location add whatever descriptions or comments I need and then save it in the true target directory with "use original date" unchecked (so that time stamp is current). This is also useful as a "move" file action. Open a previous entry in one directory, change the directory, save it, and delete the original. A "copy" excludes the last step.

Visit http://www.makehell.com/ to get a zipped archive. (local archive here)

Blosxom Mailing List Update and Change

Because of a recent bout of spam on the Yahoo Mailing List and based on old discussions of moving the mailing list to a different host where some better management could be had, Kevin Scaldeferri has opened up a new list on SourceForge.net. Click here to subscribe!

I think this is a great idea, and I hope people will make the switch soon. I'll be changing the link on this site in a few days to the new list. Let everyone know!

Interpolate Fancy as JavaScript

I've used the interpolate_fancy plugin fairly extensively to make conditional elements in my flavours so they appear only where I want them to appear. It's a really useful plugin once you get the hang of it.

Apparently Kyo Nagashima at hail2u thinks it's a great plugin, too, and has started converting it to JavaScript so the principles can be applied to any website. A lot of the syntax is exactly the same, too.

<?foo eq="123">display if "foo" is equal 123</?> <?foo ne="123">display if "foo" is not equal than 123</?> <?foo lt="123">display if "foo" is less than 123</?> <?foo gt="123">display if "foo" is greater than 123</?> <?foo like="123">display if "foo" includes 123</?> <?foo unlike="123">display if "foo" does not include 123</?> <?!foo>display if "foo" is not defined</?> <?foo>display if "foo" is defined</?> <foo/> display "foo"

I know Blosxom has spawned many children for the CGI, but I think this is the first derivative of a plugin. Good work, Nagashima-san!

Help Diagnosing Perl Module Dependencies

I was trolling the MailingList and noticed a very good tip from a certain Peter G (website, Peter, so I can link to you?). He was trying to install a plugin that had certain Perl module dependencies, but maybe because he didn't have access to the server error logs he couldn't figure out which modules were missing.

So he added this line to his blosxom.cgi which then dumped the errors into the web browser, making for easy diagnosis:

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

It's an excellent and simple diagnosis tool, and we hope it helps others!

Extensionless Plugin Updated

Frank Hecker has updated his extensionless plugin to cope with some changes brought about by the latest Blosxom update. Read more about the changes then get the plugin (local download here).

Adding PHP Comment Form to Blosxom

First of all I owe Lee Underwood a huge apology for not posting this... what, just over a month ago? When he first sent the file? So Lee, I'm sorry about that. I wasn't even cool about writing back with lame excuses. So without further excuse, here is Lee's excellent PHP script for adding a comment form to your Blosxom blog.

ADDING THE PHP COMMENT FORM TO BLOSXOM
Lee Underwood
http://www.shamar.org/weblog/

I wanted to add comments to my Blosxom blog but did not want to have them posted on the site. Originally, I just posted a link to a generic comment form located on the site. However, one of the problems was that I did not know which post the writer was referring to unless it was specifically mentioned.

Eventually, I found a small PHP script written by sws-tech.com <http://www.sws-tech.com/scripts/tellafriend.php>. It was originally created for a "tell a friend" script but I adapted it for use with comments from the Blosxom blog.

The set-up is pretty easy and you don't need a database. You just need to make sure that you can run PHP scripts on your Web site. If you're not sure, check with your Web host techs.

(You can download the file, which includes a file with detailed instructions on how to install the script and the PHP script itself, right here)

Blosxom 2.0.2 released

Today Kevin Scaldeferri released Blosxom 2.0.2, which contains several small bugfixes for the static mode and the inclusion of Blosxom in Server Side Includes (SSI) as well as a feature which supports better readability of blosxom's DATA section. See the release notes for details.

Blosxom 2.0.2 Release Candidate

Kevin Scaldeferri wrote to the Blosxom Developer mailing list, that he plans to release Blosxom 2.0.2 soon and that he sees the current CVS HEAD (Download) as some kind of release candidate.

So expect 2.0.2 to be released quite soon.

Rael's New Project

It looks like Rael has a new company, called values of n, and a new project, called stikkit. I've no idea what it is, but at a guess it might have something to do with social networking and (possibly) post-it notes?

In the News: Which CMS to Use?

Blosxom gets a nod from NewsForge as they talk about choosing an open source CMS. Always nice to get some press!

New Flavour: Autumn

Rob Garth has kindly submitted his Autumn flavour to the Blosxom community. No word on whether he's fixed some Internet Explorer bug but I agree that anyone using Windows would probably be better -and safer- using Firefox...

You can download the Autumn theme from Rob's site (local download here).

Writeback With Akismet

Kevin Scaldeferri recently integrated Akismet with Fletcher Penney's wonderful WritebackPlus plugin. The result is something that should help remarkably reduce comment spam on Blosxom blogs. Read Kevin's notes and then download the plugin (local download here)>

Children of Blosxom

I found this excellent list of Blosxom derivatives. It's a great list from a great site. For convenience I'm repeating their list below.

blosxom starter kit
blosxom starter kit version barijaona
ModBlosxom
Posy
blojsom (as Seth Milliken points out in the comments, blojsom has switched to a database structure, so it might not count now)
mod_blosxom
Phposxom
Blosxom.PHP
PHPBlosxom
PyBlosxom
lily
7blosxom
10122038
umekomiblog
Lisp Blosxom
Blosxonomy

Is anything missing?

BXR and Drafts

Here's a clever tip for creating a Drafts function for BXR.