I’d been meaning to add blog software to my site for some time, and of all the content management systems I looked into, Blosxom seemed to best suite my prejudices:
- Free and open source
- Small and easy on the server
- No annoying .php pages, as discussed in this rant
- No database — nothing to yell at me if I make changes with FTP
- Plugins to add missing features
With Blosxom now up and running, I can report that it delivers all of the above, at the cost of the following:
- Missing, out of date and incomplete documentation
- Missing, out of date and incomplete plugins
Blosxom is ancient in web terms, buoyed along by its simplicity of design. The original site is no longer updated, and while the current developers have mirrored the site to SourceForge, they appear to have done little to update it. Newer plugins can be found offsite, without documentation or generally even descriptions of what they do. Plugins listed on the conserved original site are often dead links; mirrors of the plugin code can usually be googled, but any documentation not included in the code itself is often gone. Blosxom has only basic functionality without plugins.
It is (apparently) possible for an artist with only a modest technical background to install, configure and use Blosxom. The core blosxom.cgi script is bulletproof, and the original installation instructions are quite good. Setup is minimal, and there are no dependancies. An understanding of Perl is not required.
Plugins can be another matter. Many of the plugin problems fall under a recurrent fallacy of open source: “It’s free, so I can be lazy.” Certain plugins expect the user to be a Perl hacker, which is counter to the philosophy behind the software. Others omit documentation, or are abandoned with features incomplete. Blosxom’s stop-and-go development over the years has not helped the problem. More on the plugins used on the Space Toast Pages will follow, after some notes on basic installation and the problem of “cloaking” the cgi-bin URLs.