[lug] blogging software

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke Nate Duehr
> Anyone playing with any blogging stuff they really really like?  (And
> where did that stupid name come from?  heh heh...)

Well, I built one from scratch based on a simple log script I'd been using
for years.  The original just stuffed things into .plan for use with
finger.  I decided web logs were a more mature option.  :-)

> Sean will tell me to go build one in Zope/Python or something, I'm
> sure.  (BIGGER GRIN)

Maybe.  You can try mine.  It requires Perl and mSQL.  I haven't switched
to the Perl DBI yet but that shouldn't be terribly difficult so that any DB
backend could be used.  My goal was to release it to the hackingsociety as
a project that could be worked on as a group.

http://www.graphics-muse.org/source/ximblog.tar.gz

Note: "ximblog" = Simple Blog, but X instead of S because Simblog sound
like it was a simulated blog instead of a real one.

> What's up with this "blogging API" I keep seeing hints of... something
> to be able to send web diaries from a client app or something... seems
> like an HTML interface would be fine... hmm.

Haven't seen it, but I realized that a blog was pretty straightforward to
build, especially after I'd created my own set of simple perl scripts to
generate web sites from simple HTML templates.

My log client is a perl script that lets the user generate a log locally on
their system and submit it to a blog server that stuffs it into a db on the
blog system.  The blog server is a perl script.  So you get client/server
access for submitting blog entries and can read blogs using the web
interface.  Additionally, the blog client can view your own logs locally
using your PAGER since it also keeps the logs (in ordinary text files)
locally.  The server side also saves the entries as text files and uses the
db to keep track of them.

> Lots of web toys in freshmeat... could waste many days playing with all
> of this... (I won't, though.)

Hopefully I've made it easy to set this one up.  I included some
instructions on how to do the setup.  It uses simple HTML templates (you
can add more by modifying a couple of variables to the "mkblog" script) to
generate static pages and uses a couple of CGI scripts for registering and
displaying individual users blogs.  The front page is static, generated
with mkblog through cron, for example.

Drawbacks/missing features:
1. No way to edit user profiles yet.  Once you register, you can change
your settings yet.
2. No way to edit existing logs.  Once you submit, that's the way they
stay.

BTW, the default graphics and colors are the typical Graphics Muse colors
and graphics, but you can change those pretty easily by editing the
globals.pl script and dropping in the replacement images in the specified
directories.

If you try this and have comments or would like some updates, drop me a
line at home (mjhammel at graphics-muse.org) and/or work
(mhammel at panasas.com).  Thanks.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |  Politicians are the same all over: they promise 
The Graphics Muse           |  to build a bridge even where there is no river.
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |  Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), Soviet premier. 
http://www.graphics-muse.com