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

And, of course, welcome to your very own weblog.

The installer has gone ahead and populated your weblog with a few postings to get you started and provide pointers off to further information and help, should you need it. All the documentation is kept to a docs subdirectory so as to keep it all together and allow you to easily delete it when you're ready to do so.

I hope you enjoy Blosxom and become an active part of our friendly user community.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

A Sample Post
This is a sample post. It lives in a text file, /Library/WebServer/Documents/Blosxom/docs/10sample.txt.

You can browse right to it through the Finder at Macintosh HD > Library > WebServer > Documents > blosxom > docs > 10sample.txt. Go ahead and take a gander. Feel free to open it in your favourite text editor and make a few alterations. Save it and reload this page in your browser to see your changes reflected.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

Another Sample Post
This is another sample post, this time saved to a text file in a sub-folder called subfolder (/Library/WebServer/Documents/Blosxom/docs/subfolder/20sample2.txt). You'll notice that the path ("docs/subfolder") reflects the location of this posting as one level down as compared to that of the previous "A Sample Post" ("docs").

You can create as many folders, sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, sub-sub-sub-folders, and so on as you wish. Reflecting your own personal category hierarchy in your Blosxom weblog is just a matter of saving your posts (their .txt files, that is) to the appropriate folder. Have something to say about language? Go ahead and make a set of nested folders for /society/language or /communication/spoken/language or whatever else you might prefer and save your post there.

Through the magic of Blosxom, the latest postings always bubble up to the surface, no matter where in your hierarchy they're found. You can also visit a particular folder to restrict your view to only the latest from that folder and any subfolder it contains. Try clicking the [docs/subfolder] link below and then hit your browser's back button to come on back.

And it goes without saying that you can share a Blosxom installation, whether each of you takes on a particular piece of a group hierarchy (you take /computers, I'll take /society) or each of you has your own personal blog (I'm /sam, you're /ella). Or a combination thereof (/sam writes about /sam/society and /sam/cooking, while /ella writes about /ella/computers and /ella/travel, and both write about the /internet).

Learn more at the Blosxom Web site about meandering your blog and creating a hierarchy to suit your purposes.

/docs/subfolder | writeback | permanent link

Edit in Browser
While Blosxom's use of regular text files and folders lends itself to writing from the comfort of your favourite text editor, what if you don't have a favourite? What if you'd prefer to maintain your blog from right inside your Web browser?

You can, thanks to the wikieditish plug-in.

See that "edit" link associated with each posting? Click it to edit the entry via a simple browser-based form. Make any alterations you wish to the title or body and click the Save button when you're done.

You can just as easily create a new blog entry by pointing your browser at a non -existent filename, potentially on a non-existent path (e.g. /weblog/a/nonexistent/path/nonexistent_post.edit). Give the entry a title and body and click the Save button as before. The wikieditish plug-in will create a new blog entry for you on your specified path, creating the supplied path's folder structure for you on the fly if necessary.

This Blosxom installation restricts editing to the machine on which Blosxom is actually running. Others won't even see that "edit" button. You can at any time change this default, requiring a password or altering what machines (IP addresses) can edit your blog entries by reconfiguring the wikieditish plug-in (/Library/WebServer/Data/Blosxom/plugins/wikieditish).

/docs | writeback | permanent link

Flavour
The look-and-feel of this Blosxom blog is only the default. You can customize Blosxom to your heart's content using simple template files lovingly refered to as flavours.

This installation includes a few sample flavours to get you going. The default is called, appropriately enough, "html" and is composed through head.html, story.html, and foot.html files in your blosxom directory (/Library/WebServer/Documents/Blosxom). You can see them all listed here and browse to them quickly in the finder by double-clicking the blosxom folder shortcut on your Desktop.

We've included a couple more flavours to give you a taste of what's possible: a circa 1993 view of your blog, an index of postings, and an RSS version of your blog for syndicating your writing. The rest we leave to your imagination and, of course, the more comprehensive online documentation.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

Syndicate
The ability to syndicate your writing via the wonders of RSS is built right in to Blosxom. take a gander at the RSS version of your weblog. Once you're up and running, simply provide the URL for your RSS feed to friends, family, and strangers for their perusing pleasure via one of the many RSS newsreaders available. For everything you ever wanted to know about RSS, see Ben Hammersley's "Content Syndication with RSS".

/docs | writeback | permanent link

Plug-ins
Blosxom sports a plug-in architecture allowing the core of Blosxom to remain small, sleek, and simpler-than-pie while providing room just about infinite room for extension and integration.

This installation of Blosxom comes with a couple-three useful plug-ins right in the box:

  • breadcrumbs - Breadcrumbs are a clickable trail to your current position in your weblog's hierarchy; see it in action at the top of the page.
  • writeback - Writebacks are a combination of comments and TrackBacks, allowing your readers to write back to you. Read more here.
  • wikieditish - Edit from the comfort of your Web browser. Read more here.
There are more plug-ins installed (config, whoami, sort_by_path, sort_by_name, interpolate_conditional), but you're probably best off digging into them after you're settled in and of a mind to fiddle.

You'll find oodles listed in the Blosxom Plug-in Registry.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

WriteBacks
This Blosxom installation bundles the WriteBack plug-in, a combination of comments and TrackBacks.

This affords your readers the opportunity to write back to you, comment on something you've written, augment your blog with new stories, angles, and links.

For WriteBacks associated with this weblog entry, click the blue "2 writebacks" link just beneath this paragraph on the right-hand side. Give WriteBacks a spin yourself; simply fill out the form and click the Post button.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

Further Configuration
While the Blosxom Mac OS X Installer takes care of the lion's share of configuration for you, there are a few things you can tweak to make your blog feel just that much more like home. Take a gander at the online configuration documentation for details.

And for those of you who would rather have Blosxom render the main index, hierarchy indexes, and date indexes as regular files rather than running as a CGI script, be sure to read the static rendering documentation online.

/docs | writeback | permanent link

The Haps
For the latest on Blosxom and related ideas and software, be sure to check out the Blosxom news site and/or join the Blosxom mailing list.

There's also a growing list of frequently asked questions and contributed and related software.

/docs | writeback | permanent link