Shifting a Muse based blog from PyBlosxom to its Perl based counterpart Blosxom

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I'm very satisfied with using XEmacs and Muse as a frontend for blogging and PyBlosxom as a backend for preparing the blog entries and delivering them to the webserver. But my new provider offers only a GOLPE (Good ol' Perl environment). No Python, no PyBlosxom. Too bad.

First workaround was to compile PyBlosxom to native machine code. But fiddling with PyInstaller remains unsuccessful. So I decided to give Blosxom a chance. There are some requirements that must be fulfilled before I switch over to Blosxom:

Workflow shouldn't change
Only small changes in Muse
Some external timestamp mechanism
Tagging
Some other minor features

After searching the web and some hacking a solution that works for me is near:

Steps for changing the backend

Get Bloxsom:
~> wget http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/downloads/blosxom.zip
Unzip the archive and copy blosxom.cgi to your cgi-bin directory.
Configure blosxom.cgi, esp. $datadir, $plugin_dir
Get the metadate plugin:
~> wget http://zovirl.com/2006/03/files/metadate_0_0_3.zip
Unzip the archive and copy metadate to your plugin directory.
Get the tagging plugin (if you use tagging):
~> wget http://noone.org/blosxom/tagging
Unzip the archive and copy tagging to your plugin directory.
Customize $tag_re in the tagging plugin:
my $tag_re = qr/^#tags \s*/i;
The regexp has to match the beginning of the line containing the tag list generated by Muse.

Now you should have a working Blosxom setup. Except for the stories posting dates. Muse comes with a python script that extracts the dates from the stories and writes them to a timestamp file. I've hacked a crude Perl script, that does the same job. But beware! At the moment the script comes without error checking, it doesn't obey the different date formats and it has to be executed in Blosxoms $datadir. You have been warned. At last you may customize your html templates. Hint: the placeholder for the tag list of a story is $tagging::tag_list.

Feedback

Feel free to contact me (mwe012008@gmx.net) if you have any question about this hack or if you want to make a suggestion.

Downloads

19. Aug 2007 getstamps.pl [2kb]

License

getstamps.pl is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

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