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.