recursion

Planetizen points to In Fairfax, High-Density Suburban Renewal in the Washington Post. I wish that would happen around here.

Does anyone know what's up with daypop? Their search doesn't return any results, the top forty is messed up, and the top news stories doesn't exist.

And that's too bad, because I wanted to so some ego-surfing :)

I've wanted to start a weblog for a while now, mainly to reply to some of the stuff I see on other weblogs, but I have rather picky requirements. I don't want to waste a lot of time maintaining my weblog software instead of writing entries. I don't want to fuck around with a database or anything like that.

I first discussed my requirements in a post called Before I write my weblog software... on Hack the Planet. They included:

• Free Software
• Runs with Apache
• XML export
• RSS

I also wanted nice URLs, templating, searching, and edit this page functionality. Just as important, though, were the things I didn't want: comments, users, a database: "Basically, I just want a simple weblog with solid seperation of the content from the layout that won't lock me in."

Unlike most of the things I write about online, this one was actually mentioned in a few places.

Blosxom doesn't do all the things I wanted, but it is really simple weblogging software. With the addition of some auto-formatting hacks, the blosmail email gateway, and some Apache mod_rewrite rules, it works really well for me. There's no templating, but the files are just in plain text format! What else could you need?

There for Blosxom saved the world from yet another half-implemented crappy piece of weblog software. Hurray!

For reference, here are the text formatting rules that my haxored copy of i blosxom supports:

Auto paragraphs: just insert a line between paragraphs like you would in an email.

Bold and Italics: Use email style * and _ symbols

Blockquote: indent your line by two whitespace characters

Numbered list: prefix at least two lines with a "[0-9]+." aka, a number followed by a period.

Bulleted list: prefix at least two lines with an asterix.

Auto links: Include your link in [] with the link first, then a space and any text you want to use: [url-scheme://link title]. The URL schemes which are supported by this are HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NNTP, NEWS, TELNET, and FILE. "Bare" links are also supported: http://www.eff.org

You can also include any HTML you want in your post. The system shouldn't screw up your HTML too bad, but see the list of limitations below.

To see what a plain-text Blosxom entry looks like, check out autoformatting.txt.

Some limitations of the system:

1. I don't have a "preformated" style yet, as you can tell by this entry. You need this for code examples.

1. The paragraph code is too agressive. It needs a better regex so it doesn't insert a paragraph before a line with nothing on it or HTML code.
2. Blockquote should work over multiple lines, like the bullet list and numbered list code does.
3. Blockquote should work with a single tab instead of two tabs.
4. MoinMoin style inline images are not yet supported.
5. mailto: links are not supported yet because they have a difference scheme than the others.

I'm working on fixing these problems.

As you may have noticed from my earlier entries, I am using a hacked version of Blosxom, Rael Dornfest's lightweight weblogging software which supports Wiki-like autoformatting of plain text. IMHO, this makes the system much easier to use, especially from email. I call the version I'm using 1+4i, since it adds some functionality to the current 0+4i version not in the original. There are still some kinks to work out, but I'm using it on a daily basis and finding it useful.

Rael is about to release a new version of Blosxom which supports a number of new features. I'd be honored if he would include my own hacks to Blosxom in 0+5i or 0+6i. In that spirit, here is my version of blosxom.pl