9.5 Blogging

Blogging with Blosxom is no more complex than editing a text file from the comfort of your favorite text editor — be it BBEdit, Notepad, Emacs, or Word. No cramped, featureless, browser-based checkboxes here!

Weblog entries themselves are rather free form. The only rule is that the first line becomes the entry's title, so keep it short and sweet. Format the rest of the entry to your heart's content using text and garden-variety HTML.

When you're ready to publish your new blog entry, simply save it to Blosxom's data directory, the location you specified in the $datadir configuration directive during installation. Name it anything you'd like, as long as it ends with .txt, a hint to Blosxom that it's to be picked up and included in your weblog.

Let's give it a whirl, shall we? Fire up your favorite text editor and type something inspired like:

First Post
Howdy, and welcome to my Blosxom blog.

Save the file as first.txt to Blosxom's data directory.

To get the full effect, create another entry and save it as second.txt.

Second Post
It worked twice in a row; we certainly are off to a good start :)

That's all there is to it.

Here's a helpful hint: save partially complete drafts with a .txt- extension, ensuring Blosxom won't pick them up until you're ready. When you're ready to publish, rename the entries with .txt.