barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Tue, 08 Feb 2011

Don't Know About the Future. That's Anybody's Guess.

There's something incredibly awesome about sitting in a darkened basement, drinking enengy drinks, and doing maintenance on a website. Headphones blasting a punk rock/hip-hop playlist. Washing machine and dryer quietly grinding away behind you. That's the state I'm in as I write this.

Moments, literal moments after I finished writing the previous entry, I took to the internet to find the answer to all my technical difficulties. I found them immediately in the form of a turn-of-the-millenium blogging platform called Blosxom.

It's hard to talk about why Blosxom is so great without coming across as if I've suddenly turned autistic. Most people would consider it woefully outdated. It certainly isn't easy to work with, but it accomplishes exactly what I want it to accomplish. The gist is this:

You write all your posts as plain text files, using whatever text editor you want: OpenOffice, Windows Notepad, Microsoft Word, TextEdit, Emacs, etc. I'm using JDarkRoom, which quintuples the fun.
You then upload the text file to your server.
Bloxsom then displays the text in familiar blog form. You can of course use CSS and HTML to format the blog any way you want. I'm sticking with gently formatted user defaults to keep with my original ideas about readability.

There is an RSS feed now, which I originally didn't want. What the heck. If I'm all about readability, people should be able to read the blog in an RSS reader if that's what they want to do.

There will never be comments.

There are categories, for which Blosxom's method is both archaic and hilarious. You simply create a different directory on the server for each of the categories. Blosxom then displays which directory the text file is in at the bottom of each blog post.

I have this strange appreciation for antiquated technology. It's a bit of a paradox, because I really love brand-new technology. What it is, I think, is I just hate throwing something away when it's still perfectly good.

Maybe I'll write about that next time. It's too much to go into here.

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