Craig Talbert's Weblog

When I decided I wanted to write a blog and host it on rintintin, I needed to find something that ran on rintintin's minimalist set of supported software. At the time that meant it had to run on Solaris 9, work with Apache 1.x, Perl 5.6.1 and didn't require a SQL database backend (although BerkleyDB was installed). Blosxom was one of the few ones that fit the bill, but even back then it's development community had gone a little stale. There was also TWiki that at the time could just be ran with perl, rcs, diff and grep. Anything I compiled had to live in my then 20MB of space, althought I was able to get an increase to 200MB later.

TWiki required compiling the GNU versions of serveral of the base tools (the Solaris 9 versions were incompatible) and although I was able to eventually compile SQLite on rintintin, I believe any blogging software I could find that could use it as a backend had other compatibility issues. Later there was also a split in the TWiki community that created FosWiki, and I'm still not sure which side I like or what the difference is in the software. sunfreeware.com is an amazing site with compiled binaries of common software for different Solaris architecures, but I couldn't find a way to extract the binaries from their format without have root access (it looks like the new site, unixpackages.com may have a saner approach to this). That's a long way of saying I eventually just decided to work with Blosxom.

At anyrate, I wanted to add some common features to my blog this week (comments, and buttons to share on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook) and I was partially successful. The way Facebook implemented their like button, however, is a touch disappointing as it's difficult to have multiple like buttons on one page for different items, and to get blosxom to do this would require some substaintial rewriting (I tried several hackish approaches that all failed). Disqus is also a little annoying in that you can only have one active comment section using it per page, so you have to go to the permalink for an article if you want to comment.

There have been some attempts to resurrect Blosxom, for example multi.cc had some discussion of a new version. I believe Ode is also based on Blosxom. Do I want to migrate from Blosxom to Ode? You are part of the mystery.