Blosxom

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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. When stock Blosxom sees a URL that doesn’t correspond to an existing entry or list of entries, it simply puts up a “normal” page (i.e., using the standard heat and foot templates for that flavour) that doesn’t have any actual content. I really don’t like this behavior, and thus I decided to try out the emptymessage plugin created by Fletcher Penney. Unfortunately I wasn’t entirely happy with its behavior either, and so I decided to patch it. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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. As noted in a previous post, I am a big fan of the Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool. However, nothing’s perfect. I already discussed a bug involving link ids, and I subsequently found one other reason to patch Markdown, for sites like mine that generate both HTML 4.01 Strict and XML pages (an Atom feed in my case). ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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. In creating my blog I wanted to be able to go beyond plain text entries but avoid having to hand-code HTML. I looked at various schemes for marking up plain text to indicate the presence of links, ordered and unordered lists, preformatted text, etc. In particular I was familar with Textile and Pod from having used them in my Blosxom annotations project. (I didn’t look at all of these, but some other entrants in the “plain text markup” space include ReStructured Text, Texturize, and the various implementations of text markup for Wikis.) ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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: ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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. In using Markdown I found one problem, one I’m surprised hasn’t been reported before. (I looked through the Markdown mailing list archive briefly, but didn’t see anything on this; perhaps people consider the current behavior a feature, not a bug?) I make extensive (really, almost exclusive) use of reference-style links, and noticed problems when I word-wrapped my paragraphs, so that the resulting text looked something like the following: ...