My blogging rate has been down quite a bit of late. This is partially due to demands from work and demands from my personal life colliding and providing less time for reading other blogs and commenting on them here. Plus, in the beginning, it was quite easy to blog about interesting perl modules that I had found. After all I had never blogged before so there was no track record, no history. Oh, I still review all the recently uploaded modules to CPAN. I see this as part of my job. I simply haven't noticed anything so interesting that I thought it worthy of mentioning on this blog. I also still read several dozen Perl and programming related blogs (almost) every day. Due to time constraints I often skim instead of fully groking the content. I often make mental notes to go back and reread articles and comments that look interesting. A funny thing about mental notes is they tend to get lost.

I discovered what I thought was a huge deficiency in blosxom. If you set num_entries to be something other than 0 it limits the number of stories on the home page. That makes sense, right? Hold on, what about when you select a tag and the tag references more than num_entries number of stories? Uh oh. There's no way to get to the older stories unless you happen to know the date it was written on (or you are good at using the search feature).

As it turns out there is a plugin to deal with this very problem. I add it to my plugins directory and WALLAH! the bottom of the page will now say 'next 15 entries' or 'previous 15 entries'.

I'm shocked I've blogged enough to warrant this feature.

Who am I writing this to...?

I've been using Blosxom for a few weeks now. It seems to be exactly what I wanted. Specifically I wanted a very simple blogging solution that required no database server, such as mysql, (a possible exception would be given for something like sqlite) and, preferrably, allowed me to use vim to type up the blog entries. I also hoped for tag support, reasonable indexing, and the ability to customize the theme. Blosxom is all of this.

It took me awhile to find the tagging support, but I found it (along with lots of other plugins).

If you don't like the theme then don't blame Blosxom. Blame my crazy taste in color and my love of simplicity.

If the sourceforge site is any indication it doesn't seem that Blosxom is under active development anymore. I'm not sure that's a huge problem since the most recent version of Blosxom seems fine to me. The only real problem I had was finding active links to plugins (see the links above for good links). The Blosxom homepage has links to a number of webpages that are dead.

So far I have to say I like Blosxom a lot. It has met all my requirements and fits well into the way I work. The only real question is whether I want to continue blogging.