Mike Schaeffer's Blog

One of the 'downsides' of the way Blosxom is implemented is that is relies on a post file's modification date to assign a date to the post. This makes editing files a little tricky: editing files on a Unix box updates the modification date and therefore promotes the post to the top of the blog. I don't know if there's a better way to do this, but I've written a little script that edits a file, making sure to restore the previous modification date.

The implementation is pretty simple: it uses mktemp to create a temporary file and touch -r to copy the modification dates from the post file to the temporary file and back. Be sure to modify the #! line to point to your installation of bash, should you decide to use this script. A nice generalization of this script would have it prompt for a description of the update and add the text to the post.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
  echo
  echo "This script expects a command line argument: the
  echo "name of the post to edit."
  exit 1
fi

DATE_MARKER=`mktemp /tmp/date_marker.XXXXXX` || exit 1

touch -r $1 ${DATE_MARKER}

${EDITOR} $1

touch -r ${DATE_MARKER} $1

rm ${DATE_MARKER}

My blog setup requires that I log in via ssh to my webserver to use a text editor to edit articles in raw HTML. This is the downside of using barebones blog software. On the flip side, it'd at least be pretty easy to add a (private) article submission form. All it would have to do is present a list of subdirectories in the blosxom hierarchy, and allow content from a text box to be deposited into a named file with a specified timestamp (which can be set with touch). Step 2: allow these files to be edited in a text box.

Frank Hecker, in an effort to teach himself more about Blosxom has done a cool thing. He has taken the source for Blosxom and annotated it with extra comments to describe what it's doing each step of the way. I don't know if I'll ever use the knowledge to hack Blosxom, but it's still good reading.

I've spent a little time doing some things to tweak Bloxsom so that it fits better into my website. So far, I've:

• Changed the html flavour to refer to my CSS file and use it correctly.
• Set up a simple hierarchy of post topics.
• Gotten static rendering working (as a test, it's not in use now.)

None of this is all that earth shattering, but it was all trivial to do in Bloxsom. For a one-file, 16K Perl script, Bloxsom brings a lot to the table.

Next on the adgenda is getting a web form set up for posting and hopefully editing blog posts, and then setting up a web-based way to upload images into the blog. My current workflow for posting to the blog involves two levels of nested SSH logins and the use of vi. shudder.