Playing with nanoblogger

[mdlbear]

Spent some time this afternoon installing and playing with nanoblogger -- a reasonably complete command-line blogging package in the form of a shell script. Great fun, though the code is a bit ugly and almost completely uncommented (yeah, I know... it was hard to write, it should be hard to read...).

Things I like

• Installation's a snap: just run nb --blogdir dir --add and you're in $EDITOR looking at a pretty-well-commented configuration file.
• It's built expecting that every user will have at least one blog, maybe more, in different locations and with different configurations.
• It allows for both a local working copy and an uploaded, published copy, and you can specify what command to use for uploading
• It's all stored in flat text files (no database) and all processing is done offline, to generate fast static pages on your website.
• You can re-use parts of the blog as components in other web pages.

Things I don't like

• The only available comment package uses PHP and a database, and doesn't take the local/published dichotomy into account. It's not really integrated as a plugin.
• The lack of a web interface makes it unusable by anyone but a hacker. Works for me, but I wouldn't turn my family or even many of my coworkers loose on it.
• Shell scripting, though it makes for a clever hack, is pretty inefficient.
• I don't really like the choice of representation in the raw data files -- it's tantalizingly close to RFC822 , but different.
• It's not easy to simply create a post as a file directly in Emacs and get it published.

I think nb is going to be OK for an internal, work blog, but it's not what I really need for some of the home projects I'm contemplating. Still, it has a lot of good ideas I can steal research.

The other package I've been looking at, blosxom is also pretty close -- closer in some places, farther in others. The biggest problem, at least in the Debian version, is that it's centralized: all the templates and config files are shared, so there's no good way to give every user a completely separate blog the way you can in nb. (Update 11/3: the combination of the isp and config plugins appears to fix this.)

Looks like I'll be building my own after all.