If you read my first post, you know I had quite some difficulties choosing a solution to run this blog. After having played with several tools, I ended up customizing some PHP based tool. Unfortunately, this is not a very good solution in the long term, as I have to maintain the tool myself, so I went back to the blog tool search.

I still have the same constraint, i.e. only PHP in safe-mode on the server. Considering the difficulties I had the first time to get any PHP based tool to work, this almost excludes complex PHP based tools and therefore also tools using a database. So I’m back on a static page generation approach. Yes, this excludes having comments support, but as Scobleizer pointed out, if someone wants to comment, they can do it on their own blog and references me. And I really don’t want to deal with comment spam.

So I ended up with Blosxom. I got the static generation to work. It was quite easy to port my current style to Blosxom (thanks CSS). The URL of the existing posts are changing, but they are much nicer URLs now than the precedent ones ending in .txt.

For the details, I use Blosxom in static rendering, but don’t upload the date-based files. As for plugins, I use atomfeed (for Atom web feeds), blox (to avoid having to type the html tags in the posts) and magiclink (for link formatting in the posts). I also developed a small plugin altbaseurl to be able to pass a -alturl parameter to Blosxom at command line, a parameter that replaces the $url configuration value with an alternative one.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2004 at 11:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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