Bloxsom was a wonderful piece of software...

....that used to be used to generate this website. No more. This was the original announcement

Welcome to the all-new doesharleysuck.com website.

This is a complete re-working of the site using a blog engine called "Blosxom"[1][2][3] (pronounced "Blossom"), which I am here adapting to behave like a simple Content Management System (CMS).

Blosxom is an incredibly tiny and easy to use 400+ lines of Perl that builds an entire blog web-site from a set of text file blog entries organized in sub-directories. Once setup, adding/editing site content is a simple matter of adding/editing a text file with some embedded HTML tags in the appropriate directory.

Basic setup is trivial, one can be writing blog content within 15 minutes of beginning installation. Customizing the site appearance does take a bit more time, and does require some knowledge of HTML.

The only part I found tricky was the issue of how to create a Blosxom site with multiple columns, in this case a vertical navigation menu on the left, and a content column on the right. I am accustomed to doing this with tables, which seems quite impossible the way the Blosxom layout files are designed. The solution, finally, is to use CSS to define the columns and layout. This is actually not that difficult, and is really the "modern" may to design a website anyway. I am glad Blosxom pushed me in this direction. Once the layout of the this site stabilizes I will post the CSS I used to generate the layout.

For the record, I am currently also using a number of simple plugins to generate some of the content:

• archives: generates the list of posts by year/month
• atomfeed: generates the Atom feed
• breadcrumbs: generates the "Home : Site News" menu at the top of the right-most content column
• categorylist: generates the "Contributors" list
• paginate: provides links to all available pages at the bottom of the postings, ie "<< prev [ 1 | 2 | 3 ] next >>"
• rss10: generates the RSS feed

These plugins were pulled from here[4].

[1] http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.blosxom.com/
[3] http://blosxom.ookee.com/
[4] http://blosxom.ookee.com/blog/plugins/registry/v2/listing.html