awg's blog Rarely Used.

Markdown for Loathsxome

Since I started using werc, I've become a bit enamored with Markdown. So, I figured I'd set it up for my blog, too. It already has a Blosxom plugin, so it was very quick to make it work with Loathsxome.

You can download it here. To use it, move the file to plugins/markdown in your Loathsxome directory. It should probably run last, so you might need to rename it. This is because it formats the body of the post, which can screw up meta tags and things that are grabbed by other plugins.

The Not Insane Guide to Setting Up werc

I used to maintain my website using plain old HTML files. That works fine, considering how small my site is, but I decided a CMS would be nice, and I decided werc was probably the way to go. Werc is to CMSes what Loathsxome is to blogs. It uses plain files and directories instead of some silly database. It's also written in rc, the plan9 shell, which is kind of neat.

The downside of werc is that it doesn't have a simple HOWTO or tutorial for setting it up. So, here's a quick-and-dirty version:

1. Download werc from the website, and un-tar it somewhere.
2. Follow their web server setup instructions for your web server. I use lighttpd, and the instructions worked fine.
3. Create a directory sites/example.com for your website to live in, but only if the domain of your website is actually example.com. This is where I got caught up: I was hitting the site as beta.xvx.ca, but my directory was called xvx.ca, so nothing showed up. When I symlinked beta.xvx.ca to xvx.ca, it worked!
4. Edit index.md, which will become your homepage. If you edit foo.md, it will be visible at example.com/foo. If you edit bar/index.md, it will be visible at example.com/bar.
5. If it's not working, make sure the permissions are right on everything. This caught me a couple times.
6. To change how it looks, edit the templates in lib/ and the stylesheets in pub/styles.

That step 3 cost me a lot of time. Watch out for it.

New Blog Software

I used to use Blosxom for my blog. It's a nice system in that it stores your posts in text files, and displays them in multiple views automatically. No database and no PHP required.

Recently, I found Loathsxome, which is like Blosxom but with some improvements (and a better name). I'm now using it, plus git for wrangling metadata, for this blog and my new research log. I'm quite happy with this setup.

Welcome

I can has blog?

Why yes, I can has blog.