Goodbye BlogMax

This is my last day using BlogMax for weblogging. It’s been a good
little tool but I’m going to move to
blosxom
. It does so many things well that I’m going to give it a
shot. After my easy easy experiences setting up a basic install
yesterday, I decided to go for broke. Since the BlogMax entries all
have the date in the filename and the timestamp for each entry, it was easy to write a Perl script that parsed them all, wrote a file for
each entry and then did a “touch” to change the timestamp to the
nominal creation time. Since blosxom works by file timestamps, that
was important. I worked a little to make my blosxom templates match
what I had on BlogMax (a lot of cut-and-pasting did the trick) and I
now have a weblog created dynamically with the ability for lots of
cool stuff. The new version will have writebacks, which allows people to leave comments. It will have a referer log, the ability to filter
posts by subject matter and other cool stuff.

The only downer so far has been in the plugins. Although blosxom
itself took almost no time to get going, the referer and calendar
plugins both were a big pain in the ass. Both gave Perl syntax errors
when I installed them on my webhost which required me to go in and
work with their code. It took a while to figure out that the referer
needed permissions on a directory that it didn’t have, so it was hours
and hours getting them going. Even after they are there, I don’t like
how the calendar automatically shows up on the bottom of the page (I’d rather have it on the right like I did in BlogMax.) This is Yet
Another Change of Tool, but I think this is a good thing.

Published by

dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.