blosxom

Add an FAQ Entry

Have a Blosxom tip, trick, technique, or other tidbit to share with the Blosxom community? Add a Frequently-Asked-Question (and Answer) here! I'll take a gander in short order and add it to the FAQ.

Register a Plugin

Have a Blosxom Plug-in to share with the Blosxom community? Plug it in here! I'll take a gander in short order and add it to the directory.

fullcategory

Fixes a bug [feature ;-)] in blosxom so full category names are required (partial names will no longer work)

debtags

Offers currently two tags: and bughint can be any of packagename, maintaineraddress, bugnumber or similar... More to come.

rellink

A manager of relative links/images

writeback-notify

A six-line hack of the original writeback plugin that provides for email notification of new comments. The hack does not effect the performance of the original writeback plugin.

poll

Provides public polls which can be placed in the header or footer templates,

DynamicCSS

Load different CSS Files based on the user agent that blog-viewers are using.

smilefie

Like those cute smiles in your post? This plugin converts :-) into the regular

writeback

Provides Blosxom weblogs with WriteBacks, a combination of comments and TrackBacks.

refer

This plugin is a port of the refer.php code from Refer

closingwords

Plugin to append a note to each story, such as source, credit, sentiment or admonition; default appends blog url to story.

dayinyear

Plugin for head and foot templates to display the number of the current day, week and year, like this: Day $dayinyear::numday in week $dayinyear::numweek in $dayinyear::numyear.

syndicated

Displays content syndicated via RSS.

login2

An alteration of the login plugin. This adds functionality which provides automatic logout after x minutes of inactivity. Note: not an option, but a function.

randomizer

Populates $randomizer::text with a random line from a text file.

todo

This is a pretty simple plugin; it munges the specified story's modification time to now. I use it to make sure that my To Do List always shows up under today's date.

proc2blog

Inserts an entry in your blossum blog from an incoming email using procmail. Uses a secret subject for authentication, so its not really

rss30

hack of rss10 to output RSS 3.0. uses flavour files.

relative_dir

Allows you to use relative data directory

reading_room

Allows for the (somewhat) easy creation of lists of books, films, etc, along with purchase links and star ratings.

Autoxfn

Automatically adds XFN (http://gmpg.org/xfn/) relationship data to anchor tags based on information contained in a central file.

comments_recent

Provides a list of recent comments, good for inclusion in a sidebar.

prefs

An alternative to the config plugin which has the advantage of correctly handling static rendering.

moveabletype

description:Ever wanted to use a stylesheet designed for Moveable Type with your Blosxom weblog? This theme easily shows you how to do it. Theme file is commented for those who want to see what is happening. preview_url:http://aym.engel5.net download_url:http://aym.engel5.net/download/blosxomthemes/mt.zip screenshot_url: author:David Engel author_url:http://aym.engel5.net type:Theme additional:theme and interpolate_fancy plugin. Writeback plugin used for example of comments.

desktop

description:Make your blog look like a desk. Inspired by DigitalPaper, this theme provides a realistic desk, complete with sticky notes! preview_url:http://www.tizzyd.com/index.desktop download_url:http://www.tizzyd.com/files/themes/desktop-0.5.zip screenshot_url: author:Darrin Tisdale (tizzyd) author_url:http://www.tizzyd.com type:Theme additional:You will want to personalize the legal tag at the bottom, as well as the images, if you do not want to use the Creative Commons license. The theme plugin is required for this theme to work. It also uses breadcrumbs, netflix, lastmodified, calendar, date_fulltime, and rss10.

lychnis

description:The original idea for the layout is copied from a design on OSWD, called libra. Among other things I changed it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant and to make more use of CSS. preview_url:http://www.lychnis.net/index/programming/blosxom/lychnis-theme-1.5.lychnis download_url:http://www.lychnis.net/files/blosxom/themes/lychnis-1.5.tar.gz screenshot_url: author:Ivo Timmermans author_url:http://www.lychnis.net/ type:Theme additional:

cvs

Replaces CVS keywords (such as $Id: cvs,v 1.2 2004/01/12 12:59:43 ivo Exp $) with the part after the :.

BlosGate

BlosGate- A cross-platform email-to-Blosxom gateway that doesn't require procmail or root access.

uselib

Tells Perl to look for modules in $blosxom::plugin_dir/lib.

timezone

Allows Blosxom to use a different timezone from the server. Also exports the timezone and GMT offset for use in flavors.

metadate

Lets you put metadates in an external file. Lets you specify metadates for directories or non-story files.

cooluri2

Makes Blosxom recognize date-based, extensionless URIs (aka Cool URIs) for both stories *and* categories

permalink

Generates permalinks for you so you can use a consistent link format throughout your site

Configure Blosxom

All of Blosxom's configuration is held, for simplicity's sake, in the script itself. Now don't be afraid; while there are all manner of funny-looking characters, this is really quite simple and we'll go through it a line at a time. The default looks something like this:

# --- Configurable variables -----

# What's this blog's title?
$blog_title = "My Weblog"; #

# What's this blog's description (for outgoing RSS feed)?
$blog_description = "Yet another Blosxom blog."; #

# What's this blog's primary language (for outgoing RSS feed)?
$blog_language = "en"; #

# Where are this blog's entries kept?
$datadir = "/Library/WebServer/Documents/blosxom"; #

# What's my preferred base URL for this blog (leave blank for automatic)?
$url = ""; #

# Should I stick only to the datadir for items or travel down the
# directory hierarchy looking for items?  If so, to what depth?
# 0 = infinite depth (aka grab everything), 1 = datadir only, n = n levels down
$depth = 0; #

# How many entries should I show on the home page?
$num_entries = 40; #

# What file extension signifies a blosxom entry?
$file_extension = "txt"; #

# What is the default flavour?
$default_flavour = "html"; #

# Should I show entries from the future (i.e. dated after now)?
$show_future_entries = 0;

...

# --------------------------------

Each configuration directive consists of a setting name (e.g. $blog_title, an = sign, and the setting's value (e.g. "My Weblog"). In the case of words, the value is kept between double-quotes ("); in the case of numbers, the quotes are absent. To change a setting's value, simply replace the current value with your preferred value. Be sure to leave the double-quotes intact if they're there.

For example, if you were to change your blog's title from the default, My Weblog, to Sam's Insights, that setting line would end up looking like: $blog_title = "Sam's Insights";

All clear? Good. Let's move on to the settings themselves.

$blog_title: The default title of your choosing for this Weblog. This title is available to you in your flavour templates and is the title that appears in your outgoing syndicated RSS feed.

$blog_description: The default description of your choosing for this Weblog. This description is available to your flavour templates and is the description that appears in your outgoing syndicated RSS feed

$blog_language: For use in your syndicated RSS feed, $blog_language signifies the default language for this weblog, the default of en being English. A list of some of the more popular language abbreviations may be found here.

$datadir: The most important setting of the lot, $datadir tells the Blosxom script where to find your weblog posts. This should be the full path to the folder you created when installing Blosxom.

$url: Leave this blank if Blosxom does a decent job of figuring out what the base URL for your blog should be--this is the case most of the time. Used only if you wish to override what Blosxom automagically figures out is the base URL for your weblog (e.g. $url = "http://www.raelity.org/").

$depth: It's best to leave this setting as it is until you've read and had some time to fiddle with categorization and sharing a Blosxom blog. This setting specifies whether Blosxom should stick only to the data directory or travel down any hierarchy it may find inside, looking for blog posts.

$num_entries: The number of entries Blosxom should display on your weblog's home page. This is a balance between letting older posts scroll off the bottom at some reasonable clip versus posts dropping off too soon (if you're a prolific blogger).

$file_extension: While Blosxom's default is to look for files in the $datadir ending in .txt, you can override this by altering $file_extension. E.g. (my $file_extension = "blosxom"; would have Blosxom look for files like welcome.blosxom and what_i_ate_for_breakfast.blosxom.

$default_flavour: This setting decides what default flavour is presented to the browser if the visitor doesn't specify one in particular.

$show_future_entries: This setting decides what whether post-dated blog entries show up ($show_future_entries = 1) or remain hidden until their time is come ($show_future_entries = 0), the latter being the default. Post-dating entries requires a little command-line tomfoolery using the touch command; to learn more about it, consult the "man pages" (built-in Unix manual) by typing man touch on a Terminal window.

The rest of the configuration options concern themselves with plug-ins and static rendering, both subjects you should delve into when you're good and ready to.

click here to write a test blog post...

Additional remark to the cgi hiding mechanism: ensure that all URI-s remain hidden

Tri-Bot

description:A sleek and easy-on-the-eyes 3 column floating layout using only CSS (no tables). Based on the CSS from bluerobot.com preview_url:http://yadkinriver.net/journal/ download_url:http://yadkinriver.net/downloads/tri-bot.zip screenshot_url: author:Benson W author_url:http://yadkinriver.net/journal/ type:Flavour Templates additional:plugin- breadcrumbs

entries_template

Provide alternative template for displaying story entries in index pages, so that different features can be incorporated. For example, you can display excerpts in the index page, while enable writeback form in individual stories.

wbnotify

Sends an email to specified address when a new writeback is entered. Needs writeback plugin.

Question	[e.g. how do you bliffl, blaffl, or blot?]
Answer
Category	[e.g. /windows, /templates, /installation/mac]
Author Name	[e.g. Jane or John Smith]
Author URL	[e.g. http://www.example/weblog]

Plug-in Name	[e.g. bliffl, blaffl, or blot]
Description
Plug-in URL	[e.g. http://www.example/plugins/bliffl.html]
Author Name	[e.g. Jane or John Smith]
Author URL	[e.g. http://www.example/weblog]
Configuration
Additional Bits	[e.g. Perl modules: Text::Something, WWW::Another::Thing]