[ 2003-November-24 12:25 ]

I just wasted a scary number of hours trying to force blosxom into a form that will work for managing my personal website. Unfortunately, it is not to be. Blosxom just has too much hardcoded behaviour that I need to customize, and the perl code is very ugly. It does still make a good blog tool.

So what do I want? Blosxom-style content management: Put a bunch of HTML fragments in a directory, and get a website generated, along with RSS. I don't need anything fancy, I just don't want to have to maintain my web site by hand anymore. Here is what I want:

• Story files contain very plain HTML
• Story files are combined with templates to create output files.
• Output is passed through additional stages:
  • Spell checking
  • XHTML validation
  • Link checking
• Index pages are automatically generated, combining "readme" fragments along with links to stories and to subcategories.
• Indexes are made both by category and by date. Date indexes just point to the real stories in the categories.

I'm thinking that if I use CSS liberally, I don't need fancy templates, just some basic headers and footers attached. I'll probably take a stab at writing this eventually.