{"id":80,"date":"2003-11-19T07:40:00","date_gmt":"2003-11-19T07:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/WebDev\/Blosxom\/zenslipping.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"zenslipping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/2003\/11\/19\/zenslipping\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Zen is Slipping"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blosxom<\/a> has a catchphrase, “The Zen of Blogging.” I’m not feeling very Zen-like at the moment.<\/p>\n

Tonight, I helped a friend set up a new Blosxom install. He has been using Greymatter, but he’s had a few problems with it. I’ve been trying to convince him to use Blosxom, so he decided to give it a whirl. Installed the basic blosxom.cgi.<\/p>\n

Now in his case, are bare-bones install is pretty close to exactly what he needs. He displays his blog inside a scrolling IFrame as part of a larger site design, so he doesn’t want any fancy flavours\/themes. The default .html flavour would work well for him, except he needed multiple author attribution. He also wanted an easy way to post over the web, and he wanted to avoid writing direct HTML.<\/span><\/p>\n

I assured him this was simple. Just add the author plugin for multiple authors; that requires the meta plugin, but so does wikieditish, which will let you post over the web. And grab Textile2 so you don’t have to write HTML<\/span> in your posts. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as one would hope. I’ve been using Blosxom for some time, and knew the steps. I’ve also been working on a new project using Blosxom lately, so I figured I was up to speed. Yikes. After an hour and a half, it’s sort of working. Textile is still busted, and I don’t know why. Got authors working, after a half hour of problems, in the end it seems I’d forgotten that meta has to load before authors, so meta has to be renamed. This isn’t really an onerous requirement, and it’s one that I knew of, but it wasn’t actually documented in any of the stuff we downloaded. What a pain.<\/p>\n

Also ran into the wikieditish date-preservation bug<\/a> which is still present (Note to self: keep blogging bug fixes… never know when you’ll need them again). Also, the default .html flavour (that no one uses) is kinda buggy. I ended up making an external verion of it, using the 1993 flavour from the flavour sampler. Still need to send him some improved RSS<\/span> flavour files; the defaults aren’t that great. I’m sure there were a couple of other gotchas, but I’m tired now and not remembering everything.<\/p>\n

All in all, Blosxom is a great, highly extensible tool with a great community<\/a> around it. But the overall ‘new user experience’ is still too… Zenless. I hope we can improve that.
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Blosxom has a catchphrase, “The Zen of Blogging.” I’m not feeling very Zen-like at the moment. Tonight, I helped a friend set up a new Blosxom install. He has been using Greymatter, but he’s had a few problems with it. I’ve been trying to convince him to use Blosxom, so he decided to give it […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blosxom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}