UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest.
I’ve been investigating using the Blosxom weblog application for my personal blog, and felt disadvantaged by my lack of knowledge of Perl (the language in which Blosxom was written). I began making detailed notes while I was reading through the Blosxom code (blosxom.cgi); my note taking quickly got out of hand, and here are the results, for anyone who’s interested:
- Annotated blosxom.cgi (popup version) with notes displayed in popup windows;
- Annotated blosxom.cgi (footnote version) with notes displayed as footnotes at the bottom;
- Annotated blosxom.cgi (popup version, folded) and annotated blosxom.cgi (footnote version, folded), versions of the above files, with code lines folded at 80 columns for improved readability and notes displayed as popups or footnotes respectively; the latter version in particular is suitable for printing and reading offline.
The annotations are intended primarily for people who are interested in Blosxom and have done some programming, e.g, writing Unix shell scripts or creating JavaScript code for a web page, but who are unfamilar with Perl.
To create the above files I started with a version of blosxom.cgi with added in-line notes and translated that into HTML using a Perl program I wrote myself; for more information see the notes2html code and notes2html man page. (This is my first substantive Perl program; comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.)
Finally, note that I’ve been so busy doing the annotations that I haven’t had time yet to actually create my blog. Oh well . . .
UPDATE: Well, I finally did create my blog. I also updated the URIs to be in canonical form, i.e., without .html extensions; the old URIs will still work, but will redirect to the canonical ones.