Wednesday, 12th March 2003
Blosxom rocks
I’ve been hearing a few good things about Blosxom recently, so a few days ago I decided to see what all the fuss was about. It’s a blogging tool, but it’s a very different species from the average system. Firstly, it’s only 282 lines of Perl (of which only 135 are actual code). Secondly, rather than having a web interface of some sort to add entries it runs entirely from the file system. You specify a data directory, then create entries by dropping .txt files in to that directory using your favourite text editor. The first line of each file is the title, the rest of the file is the entry, and the entry’s date is taken from the last-modified time of the file.
More lightweight software: SQLite
The other toy I’ve been playing with recently is SQLite. SQLite is an embeddable SQL database engine written in just under 25,000 lines of (heavily commented) C. Don’t let the size fool you—it’s phenomenally powerful and is released under a no-holds-barred public domain license that practically begs you to include it in your applications, commercial or not.
[... 239 words]More nukes
[PHP|Post|myPHP]-Nuke has to be one of the most-forked open source projects in history! Xaraya appears to be a fork from Post-Nuke, which itself forked from PHP-Nuke several years ago (and I’m pretty sure there are more). They’ve got an interesting set of RFCs on how they intend to build the next big open source content / community management system (nothing about generating pretty URLs yet). While browsing their site I found a link to PHPXref, a powerful looking tool for generating PHP source code documentation. Unsurprisingly for such a lot of text munging, it’s written in Perl ;)
[... 119 words]