Blosxom, Rael's lightweight-but-full-bodied Free Software blogging engine, hit 1.0 today. Blosxom is licensened under the GPL, and is written in perl, and has been hacked up and down the block by a bunch of very sharp coders. It's still tiny and smart.
I was thinking about this the other day: there's a kind of ethic in blogging tools that makes them into the most minimal glue possible. For the most part, blogging tools don't have web-servers built in — we have Apache for that. If you want your logs monitored, well, there's analog or WebFunnel. Want to create an entry? What better tool for it than BBEdit, vi, emacs or TextPad? Image editor? The GIMP and/or Photoshop are swell — who wants to re-create them for a blogging tool? So now there's Blosxom, which dispenses with the database and just uses the filesystem. The point being that we all know how to use our OS's filesystem, and we have great tools like the Finder and so on for manipulating files in the filesystem. Want to back up your blog? Drag its folder onto a CD burner. Want to delete an entry? Drag it into the trash. You get the point. It's pretty gnarly.
Rael's one of the hardest-working men in showbusiness, and he's been pushing Blosxom up the hill in his non-copious non-spare time. 1.0 must feel like a million bucks.
Fundamental is its reliance upon the file system, folders and files as its content database. Blosxom's weblog entries are plain text files like any other. 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, Blosxom doesn't skimp on features, sporting the majority of features one would find in any other Weblog application.
