encoded notions

I just wasn’t happy with the whole feel of this website since the last time I fiddled with the layout and data-interface. Quite to my dismay, I couldn’t think my way around the problem for the longest time.

Rewind At the HOGS Lake Onanda Trip, enhancements for the floor’s website were suggested and all of them seemed to be drawing my mind in the direction of slashcode. Multi-user submission and topic categories were among the few things that spoke “slashcode” to me.

Ok, so I went online and tried to figure out exactly how painful it would be to do a test-install of slashcode on my main box.

1. the Mysql database
2. use perl’s CPAN module to fetch Slash
3. the Apache webserver
4. mod_perl for Apache
5. the slashcode package

“That’s not so bad,” I thought to myself. It should only take 2-3 hours, with emphasis on the “should”.

Well, I did get 1, 2, 3, 4 compiled and installed, and I compiled 5, but it refused to install. Add to that the fact that the slashcode installation documentation gives these ambiguous instructions:

Create a database to be used by Slash.
Create a username/password that can access that database (by default, we normally set the user to have all permissions, but that might not be appropriate for your site; make sure that you have at least privileges to select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, and index).

Ok, so I had to spend a bit of time scouring the internet, looking for a nice, easy tutorial on priming a mysql installation. So, now about another hour passes before I find something that is helpful enough to coerce mysql into properly talking with the slashcode daemon. So I’m left with step #5. It won’t compile, so I fiddled with the options and poof it works. Great, now after a “make install” and all I have left to do is get the daemon up and running. It turns out that when I try to run the daemon, I get a screenful of error messages.

This is when I officially give up with slashcode and move on to better wastes of my time.

I went back to Google and went looking for some sort of blogging software that I could kluge into an approximation of slashcode that would work well for the HOGS website. And this is where I found Blosxom.

Yay! It’s written in perl. Yay! It doesn’t rely on any database systems because it uses the filesystem’s natural hierarchal structure as a database (Fsck you mysql!). Yay! It doesn’t even use any obscure perl modules. I’m loving it already.

Since the license seems to indicate that code modification is appreciated, I start to hack it. Upon examining the ~135 lines of code, I start the gradual process of removing lines for features that I do not want, and leave behind small hooks for features that I will add later. Because it is rather impossible to login to the HOGS webserver until Fall Quarter begins, I chose to use my own website as the guinea pig body of content for the development of the Blosxom derivative that I’ve titled Orchid.

Orchid’s not quite at version 1.0 yet, but I’ll just call it that for now because I feel like it. :+)