Sam Danielson

Tara, my wife, has been maintaining her personal blog primarily with php for templating and no database. Recently she had the desire to add RSS feeds but since her pages and articles consited of only php files we would need to either scrape the feed from the pages or start using some real blog software. I have been using mephisto so I set that up for her. After we both had done considerable work on templating and transfering content she decided to just retemplate her php setup and worry about RSS later. I think it was a sound decision. After all, editing in the browser sucks. She’s been using vim but now prefers the aquamacs style of emacs since I introduced her to that. What can I say? A blog should be nothing more than a directory full of files that gets scanned into an index for display via html or rss. The metadata in liunx is a bit sparse since there is no creation date on files – just accessed and modified time. Publishing, tagging, and categorization could be handled through symlinks. Search could be a done via grep and cgi but I’m a little worried about escaping the search string correctly. Comments can be an entirely seperate system for all I care. If only linux wasn’t so tantilizingly close to a multiuser CMS/Blog. It’s close – but no cigar.