Chapter 9. Minimalist Blogging with Blosxom

Blosxom (pronounced Blossom) is a lightweight, yet feature-packed, weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind.

Fundamental is its reliance upon the filesystem — folders and files — as its content database. Blosxom's weblog entries are plain text files. Write from the comfort of your favorite text editor and hit the Save button. Create, edit, rename, and delete entries on the command line, via FTP, WebDAV, or anything else you might use to manipulate your files. There's no import or export; entries are nothing more complex than title on the first line, body being everything thereafter.

Despite its tiny footprint — at the time of this writing, a mere 61 lines of Perl code — Blosxom sports the majority of features one would find in any other weblog application: multiple weblogs under just one installation; multiple authors — anyone with access to the filesystem may be a full-fledged blogger; daily, monthly, and individual entry ("permalink") archives; and RSS content syndication, to name but a few.

Blosxom's simplicity brings with it great flexibility. Customize your weblog's look and feel with any HTML, stylesheets, and the like you're accustomed to using. Incorporate Blosxom output into your existing template or web development framework. Blosxom is simple, straightforward, minimalist Perl affording even the dabbler an opportunity for experimentation and customization. And last, but not least, Blosxom is open source and free for the taking and altering.