Sat, 11 Nov 2006
Lola Revisted
This weblog is done in Blosxom, but the version I use has been orphaned. For some time I've been working on my own weblogging code called Lola, but it's grown and grown with no end in sight. So I decided to take another look at the problem and come up with something simpler and smaller. Blosxom is a hack by Roel Dornfest, who has since moved onto other things, namely yet another Web 2.0 startup. The hack in Blosxom is that the Unix filesystem is the database. This is a fruitful ideas that saves a lot of code and effort, but as with everything there are trade offs. The trade off in Blosxom is that the metadata for each entry is limited to what the file system will store. My first attempt at Lola moved the metadata into a separate file, but this adds complexity to the code. Coordinating separate files is more problem than it's worth, as I should have learned with my work at the Space Telescope on different image formats. So the metadata will go back into the file with the post, called out by "#meta" lines. This idea comes from one of the many extension to Blosxom. The trick is to use the same format (and code) for all the files used by Lola to save time and effort and yet have a flexible enough system that you're not painting yourself into a corner. Conceptually, displaying a weblog is simple. You parse the path info passed in the url, fetch the configuration information, fetch the entry or entries based on the path info, pour the data into the html template, and print it with the proper headers. I hope to pare this process down to a thousand lines or so of Perl code. Anyway, those are my thoughts this weekend.
