Tag Archives: Blosxom

Blosxom API

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I’ve not been following the blosxom list much of late, but I noticed a post today from a chap called Allen Hutchison saying that he’d started a Yahoo group to work on the development of a blosxom implementation of the metaweblog API, with possible future support for the Atom API. He’s also posted to his blog on the topic and set up a feed from there, too. Very organised.

I’ll going to keep an eye on this, although I’m not sure if I can take a particularly active part in the development right now. A few weeks back I started tinkering with an Atom client-server for blosxom and got a little code working before I put it to one side for a variety of reasons, but it’s something I’m meaning to get back to eventually, and it’s about time I started being a bit more active again.

Postscript: This post marks the creation of a new category for blosxom-related posts. In the past they’ve ended up in a varitey of places (there’s a couple of minor plugins here, for example), but I keep changing my mind. Perhaps I ‘ll be a bit more consistent form now on ;-)

blosxom plugin: altlinks

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This is a trivial plugin I wrote to scratch a bit of an itch. It had always slightly annoyed me that while blosxom itself was designed to use the filesystem hierarchy as its structure and allowed you to view pages based on their position in the hierarchy, there was no simple method to include alternate <link>s to syndication feeds or alternative flavours that mirrored a visitor’s position. Hence altlinks.

Currently, the plugin works for path-based views right the way down to individual story pages, but date-based paths are ignored completely – the href attribute will be formed from whatever path information is available in the requesed URL. That is, if you request http://yourblog.net/path/2003/10, the alternate will have an href attribute pointing to http://yourblog.net/path/index.flavour. I originally thought this wouldn’t matter, but I suppose for the sake of completeness I should I add this at some time. When I get around to it, I will post an updated version here.

I wasn’t going to post this code at all, particularly since it’s not quite finished, but then I thought it might be useful to someone somewhere sometime, so here it is. The plugin provides three variables for use in templates, allows the user to specify which flavours these variables point to, and contains full documentation.

Slight Adjustments

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I’ve made some very slight adjustments to the writeback plugin which allows you to comment on or trackback to my posts. This is based on Fletcher Penny’s version of Rael’s original writeback plugin. Any comments you might leave should be formatted with the paragraph and line breaks you type, without the need for you to include any HTML. In fact, any HTML left in comments at all will now be escaped and rendered visible.

Please feel free to give this a try and let me know if you have any trouble. Thanks!

Comments!

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As the observant amoung you might have noticed I’ve added a facility to comment on my posts. I wrote the script that manages this over the weekend, and it’s pretty crude right now and still very much “beta”, so if anyone reading this has problems using it please let me know – I’d be very grateful. Likewise if for some reason you are interested in seeing the source code. It’s a fairly simple perl script and currently stores comments in text files, which might not scale too well for a site that has greater traffic than this one.

Also I’ll just mention that this blog is now running Blosxom 1.2 beta 2, which seems to be working well. I understand that the full 1.2 will be available soon.

Blosxom 1.0 released

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Rael Dornfest has just announced to the Blosxom mailing list and in a post to his blog that Blosxom 1.0 is now available. Blosxom is the blogging tool I use, a very flexible little perl script, and I’ll be upgrading as soon as I’ve had a play around with the new script (I’ve added a little non-portable customisation of my own that I’ll need to get working).

On the subject of blogging tools, I’m hopefully going to be adding comments and trackbacks to Random and Irrelevant soon, although I’m not quite sure why…