Inspirational Technology

Thinking about Blosxom

I'm thinking about moving this site to Blosxom from MovableType. I'm getting annoyed with a lot of things about MovableType, in particular how slow it is when publishing. Each time I add a post it gets a little slower and it's starting to really bug me. I'm also annoyed by how cumbersome it is to edit templates, especially since I have more then one blog and they all use the same templates. I also like the way NetNewsWire handles Blosxom blogs, it shows you the hierarchy and all posts you've made at all times. With MovableType you only get your recent posts and if you restart NetNewsWire you'll only get the last 10 or so posts you've made. This makes it really cumbersome to go back and edit your old posts. There are many other little things as well that are bugging me as I use this system more.

I really like the simple, simple file based mechanism that Blosxom uses. I've always considered MovableType's use of a database as massive overkill (even if it is just MySQL). I also like the idea of being able to build the whole thing locally and then just shove it up on the server with nothing major needing to be installed on the server.

After reading through the documentation it looks like the one problem area with Blosxom may be categories. I tend to add posts into several different categories, but it looks like Blosxom may only support one category for each post. I'll explore this a little more to find out for sure, but it can't be that hard to make it use symlinks or something to do it.

I found this site which has some pretty good information on making the move.

There's also a version written in Python that looks interesting. Hmm, that could actually be fun. Blosxom is written in Perl and even though I'm perfectly comfortable writing Perl code, it's not something I really enjoy anymore. Python, however I do like. Very, very tempting.

If I do make this move it will be the fourth time I've changed the software I use for this blog. Ugh! Sadly, it probably won't be the last either.