If you're a fan of Perl of Blosxom you'll appreciate the fully annotated Blosxom script by Rob Reed.

I did my bit for Pivot by helping to get text importing to Pivot - this means people with lots of text files or people (like me) who have a Blosxom based website can suck the content into a slightly fancier blogging engine.

Base-hosting plans often don't include database access so simple web tools like Pivot & Blosxom are a godsend.

I suspect I'll be importing and moving my website to Pivot shortly although Blosxom is so simple I'm not sure if I want to learn a whole new 'engine' and templating system . . .

Header graphic is a sunset over Pauanui beach. The Coromandel is a lovely place if you can avoid the Jafa's buying up property and plonking million dollar mansions in amongst the local bach's.

Ended up modifying an open source template from Asphaug for use with Blosxom. CSS is much trickier to get a handle on than I thought - I can see why templates are so prevalent - designing from scratch is a pain and the tools are not much better than those used at the dawn of the web (ie a text editor).

Bear with me as I experiment with the Reading Room in the right sidebar (note I haven't added my own books in yet - these are just the default ones).

Looks like a great perl GUI toolkit front-end - Sprog. The article demonstrates who to put a Sprog filter together to turn a web based phone list into an LDIF (LDAP Interchange Format) file. Sprog sourceforge project is here.

I just realised my Blosxom 'categorytree' plugin wasn't working. The Blosxom web page was loading fine but none of the sub links/categories were working.

A quick search of the faq turned up this tidbit on url-hiding.

And I just had to add to my .htaccess file

Whats wierd is that I thought I had this fixed already.

This site uses blosxom version 2 with the following plugins blox, breadcrumbs, calendar, categorytree, flatarchives and state.

Blosxom is a simple perl script that works in conjunction with your web server - essentially each post is a seperate text file which you place in directory and that gets served up according to some simple rules that can be configured in Blosxom itself. Folders for posts represent categories, plugins provide extra features and flavours allow you to customise the look and feel of the site. Blosxom also automatically generates an RSS/XML feed from your posts making it easy to subscribe to updates in a feed-reader.

I've just discovered blosedit for web based editing although I also use the Mac OS X app blapp and of course ssh / vi.

Handle CPAN module installation -

Will download and install the libnet perl module in the same way as a debian apt-get install or redhat up2date.

Searching CPAN will give you the appropriate module names.

First time you run it you'll need to answer some simple queries but once its setup it seems to work fine.

You can reconfigure the CPAN settings via