Colophon
The Blosxom.com site is built entirely on and powered by Blosxom using nothing but what comes on board and the power of a selection of user-contributed plugins. For those interested, here are some of the niggly-nagglies...Environment
My CMS is the latest and greatest version of Blosxom run in a hybrid of static (most pages) and dynamic (anything involving user-input: writebacks, registering a plugin, etc) modes. The server is running FreeBSD, an operating system I came to know rather well as a sysadmin (now in recovery). The site is--of course--served up by Apache. I'm running a recent vintage of standard issue Perl (Blosxom is 100% pure Perl) with no particularly special modules installed. I write in a combination of vim and BBEdit, depending on whim and locale.Plugins
There are some terrific plugins available for Blosxom, the lion's share (I'm glad to say) not written by me. To take Blosxom beyond merely being a blogging system (as if that weren't good enough), I've employed some of these plugins in interesting and useful combinations:- breadcrumbs displays that attractive navigational aid (e.g. home :: colophon.txt) at the top of each page
- config affords all-but-infinite combinations of configuration and plugin activation throughout the site
- entriescache speeds things up by maintaining an index of entries Blosxom already knows about so it doesn't keep having to meander the hierarchy
- file brings in components like the toolbar and writeback form
- find finds things for you
- interpolate_conditional conditionally alters what appears or doesn't appear on any particular page (e.g. "Be the first to contribute to this page..." when there aren't yet any writebacks for the page at hand)
- meta means I have the ability to tag particular entries with meta tags for use in my templates when appropriate (e.g. "next..." at the bottom of some pages are the result of
meta-next: someurltags) - postheadprefoot pastes in additional bits after the header or before the footer (e.g. the introductory text on the plugin registry page
- registry is a little something I whipped up to turn the details of plugin registry entries into template variables
- sort_by_path sorts the plugin registry by path rather than date
- submission allows you to submit your plugins to the registry
- wikieditish means I can edit anything on the site through a browser-based form if I feel so inclined
- wikiwordish means never having to remember where things are ;-)
- writeback funcationlity at the bottom of each and every page on the site invites tweaks, twiddles, additions, subtractions, questions, and answers from you, gentle reader
Coming Soon
I'll be adding FAQs, Use Cases, and Contributed software registries a la the Plugin Registry shortly for your reading and (especially) writing enjoyment.