Blosxom: The Zen of Blogging | Hacker News Reader

Blosxom: The Zen of Blogging

blosxom.com

62 pointsTomte27 comments

For those unaware Bloxsom was/is what would today be described as a static site generator written in Perl. Like Jekyll et al it just takes plain text files and turns them into HTML in the same layout as the source files on disk.

It is very extensible and had plugins to handle things like bbCode and MediaWiki markup to embedding Amazon links from an ASIN. Before WordPress ate the blogging world it had some popularity, it didn't need a database or even CGI support.

Love Blosxom! Still using it to power my senescent blog[0]. Rael Dornfest's original Perl script was later annotated separately by Frank Hecker[1] and Rob Reed[2]. (Neat side note: according to Rob, Blosxom "played a part in my decision to go back to school to get a masters in computer science".)

[0] https://tinyapps.org/blog

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100712013556/http://www.hecker...

[2] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201003250700_rob_reed_ode.html

s/my senescent blog/respected and always relevant blog

FTFY

Downvoted for a compliment?

Sorry about that, Tom; the blog is perhaps not quite so universally loved ;-). Over the past few decades, I've certainly received a number of spicy missives from across the political and ideological divide. One of the best things about being a tiny part of the HN community over the years has been learning from dang's example; I don't always agree with his moderation or comments, but marvel at his ability to stay unruffled in the face of extreme provocation.

This is the first time I've ever upvoted a comment about downvotes (mea culpa!); I generally downvote them on principle ("Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."[0]). I've found it best to simply comment as Providence directs and let the votes sort themselves out without any investment or expectation.

Apologies if this unsolicited advice has nudged you from fan to foe; I merely "say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say."[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201507190700_what_else_do_you_do.h...

Thanks, I do get it. I know the guidelines. Doing this occasionally is my one tiny act of civil disobedience here on HN. I think downvotes should be subject to discussion so from time to time I dole one out. Love your work BTW!

> Love your work BTW!

Thanks so much - glad to hear that it is of some small use to someone other than just myself!

Back in college I used PHPosxom, which was "inspired" by Blosxom but I guess dynamically created pages instead of statically generating them (and of course used PHP instead of Perl, useful if PHP was more accessible/functional on your shared hosting). https://sourceforge.net/projects/phposxom/ Of course the project is super dead now.

Here's my old homepage using PHPosxom, which would be valid XHTML 1.0 if the Swarthmore College Computing Society hadn't started injecting analytics into my web site: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/nelson/

I used to serve my pages declared as XHTML from free webhosts (remember those loads of 100-ish MB hosts that kept springing up in the 2000s?) that had the added side-benefit that the injected banner adverts were not valid XHTML and therefore stripped by browsers at the time.

Does not really inspire confidence when half of links on the page does not work.

* mailing list - Does not work

* news - Broken

* donate - Broken

* Overveiew -> Install -> 404; however Install works.

Bloxsom is nearly twenty years old. That site itself is almost that old.

I am not sure why this hit the front page of HN. Blosxom is old and I am pretty sure not "actively" developed any more but I could be wrong.

Also See https://pyblosxom.github.io/ For a python implementation.

Blosxom is old but its ground idea still matters today

Pyblosxom itself is no longer in active development. Most recent tweet in 2018. https://twitter.com/PyBlosxom

Blosxom is awesome! I use it all the time myself http://www.rabbitfarm.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/

If you’re interested in Perl, Prolog, or NetBSD maybe there’s something of interest for you. Mostly a lot of coding experiments.

I could see by the premise that it was great, back in the windows 2000/XP days (judging by the requirement sections).

However today, I think I'd rather go even one step further and just use site generators, such as Hugo.

Back in 2001, Blogspot[1] was a good option but it had no comments (Guest Book). So, a good Russian developer approached me to try out his commenting system called something like "Blogcom". I think I used it for a year or two.

Blosxom reminds me of that BlogCom.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)

The issue isn't the tool to get your blog up, but hosting it.

The real solution will be a super easy app that lets you push the blog out to:

- git* pages

- digital ocean/vultr/aws/wherever

- netlify/forestry as an advanced feature

- move it easily from one to the other

(You have to set up an account on the target and provide the app with credentials/tokens or whatever).

Setting up markdown-> html+css themes is what everyone focuses on

Very nice. Does anyone remember Moveable Type?

Yes, my blog was powered by Movable Type in 2002.

I think Moveable Type is still a going concern. I think there's even a hosted platform.

My main blog is still powered by blosxom and it was trivial to set up a gemsite using it.

I wrote a few commonly used plugins for it back in the day. It was lovely for its time, and the concepts are still relevant now.

I suspect that some readers of Hacker News were not born when this was popular.

From a readability and aesthetics perspective, this doesn't look great imo.

[Bear Blog](https://bearblog.dev) fits into this niche of super minimal blogging platforms as well.

Blosxom is not a "platform". It's a Perl script.

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