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.

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.)

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!

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.

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!

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)

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!

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.

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.

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?

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

Peter Richard has updated his Blosedit blog editing CGI. It now has static rendering hotness! It's still in beta so beware (if you beware such things...). Download it here (local download here).

Among the many derivations of Blosxom to PHP, Python, Java, Lisp, Ruby, etc, this JavaScript version from Japan tickles my fancy. As often happens, I wish I understood Japanese so I could give more information, but there is the blosxom.js file and an index.html file (view source code for the page) and that appears to be it (local download of the two files here).

What popular languages are missing? Should someone create a Flash version next? :)

Today on the MailingList, Gustaf Erikson pointed to an interesting article by Mark Dominus who says that Blosxom sucks and that this is a compliment.

He divides software designers into two general groups:

• Those who want to develop "The Perfect Thing", complex, full of features, bells and whistles and therefore bloated.
• And those who want to keep the design simple with all needed features and only some easy to implement bells and whistles and therefore slim, small and overviewable.

He calls the last approach the "Worse Is Better" approach and says that Blosxom is a really good example for this philosophy of software design. That's why he sees his statement "Blosxom sux" as a very positive one.

This somehow reminds me to the KISS principle.

Daisuke Murase is creating Catlxom. What is that? I'm not sure but apparently it's a combination of Blosxom and Catalyst, a kind of rapid development Perl platform. Or something. Anyways it could be interesting, but so far there's nothing to discover. Yet.

Just a reminder that there is a Blosxom IRC channel hosted by Freenode. Predictably the channel is #blosxom. Thanks to Matthijs Kooijman for the reminder!

Matthijs Kooijman is reporting success in getting the writeback_recent plugin to work with Frank Hecker's feedback commenting plugin. Read about it here and make note of the one change in the feedback plugin he made.

Blosxom has made it to Wikipedia. There both English and French versions. Since it's a wiki feel free to contribute to their information!

Thanks to Axel Beckert for the tip!

I'm loathe to post this because I'm worried many will get the wrong impression. Still, it is news and it does warrant attention. Rael Dornfest, the creator of Blosxom, has switched his personal blog to Typo. You can read about it here, though he has scant details on the reasons why.

Ryan Barrett tipped me to the change and asked, "What do you think of this? Are we seeing the beginning of the end for Blosxom?" The answer is absolutely no.

(click here to read more...)

Barijaona has updated his BlosxomSK (starter kit). It includes the latest version of Blosxom V2 and various plugins which were updated as a consequence. Read more about it and download it from here (local download here).

Please note that this is currently French only and that Barijaona is working to update the other international languages.

UPDATE
The package has been updated to include English (local download here). We don't mean to complain, Barijaona! We truly appreciate the efforts you've put into the starter kit. From my point of view yours and hail2u's installation packages are second in importance for Blosxom only after the main blosxom.cgi.

So thank you for your hard work! :)

Daisuke Murase has created a Perl module that is directly influenced by Blosxom's idea of flavours. It is called Catalyst::Plugin::Flavour. "This plugin allows you to handle request flavours like Blosxom. When top level path token in request match your flavour, that is stored in $c->flavour and deleted $c->path while $c->prepare_action. So you can handle several flavours same controllers."

Kevin Scaldeferri announced the release of Blosxom v2.0.1 from the Blosxom Sourceforge Development Project. It includes the following bug fixes:

* Fixed XML escaping of RSS feeds
* Ignore editor backup files in the plugin directory (i.e. "myplugin~")
* Set path_info variables correctly for all static pages.

You can download the updated CGI here (local download here). This version is completely compatible with any previous v2 installation, including plugins. Before you install be sure to change the configurable variables (like the $datadir) to what your current installation uses.

Hopefully Kevin and the other contributors will make sure their names are added under Rael's in the CGI as authors with the next release!

While Blosxom may not have taken the world by storm like other blogging systems (like, say, Wordpress), it certainly started a trend. That's is why we find the Blosxom meme being ported from the original Perl to Java (Blojsom), PHP (Blosxom.PHP), Python (PyBlosxom), Lisp (Lisp-Blosxom) and many others.

Now we can add Ruby to the list with Blosxonomy.

Blosxonomy is a very lightweight Blosxom like blogging system written in Ruby, and designed around four core ities: simplic-ity, taggabil-ity, extensibil-ity and compatibil-ity.

Welcome to the show, Ruby!

If you've ever wrote a patch or hack for the core Blosxom script that fixes a known (or unknown!) problem, please submit it to the Blosxom Developers for integration in the project. Kevin Scaldeferri, the project leader, is hoping to release a bug fix version of Blosxom over Thanksgiving weekend, Novemeber 24th - 27th.

As promised to the MailingList, Lee Underwood has posted his review of Blosxom on WebReference.com. It's quite friendly to Blosxom, although I think Frank "Heckler" might have an issue with his family's name. :)

While I'm at it, Aaron Toth mentions Blosxom in his review of blogging systems. It's always nice to get some attention!