Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Saturday, 1 June 2002

# 10:45 PM

After five months of bloggery by hand, Ex Bibliotheca is now powered by Blosxom, with a number of personal hacks applied. To do this, I had to change the base URL; you may have noticed a nasty nag message on the way in, or you may not have, depending on whether the server redirect is still present. Please update bookmarks accordingly.

One nice effect of this change is that I can now do like Sumana did, and provide permanent links to individual entries. That's what the hash marks to the left of each date stamp are. (Sumana calls them pound signs. The Jargon File entry for ASCII appropriately points out that

...There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh).

On the down side, all the time stamps are stuck in Greenwich Mean Time for no apparent reason. I have done the appropriate magic to make them appear in Pacific time, but it doesn't work. Yet.

I may change software again; Blosxom is nice and simple, but it's also rather heavyweight - one file per entry, all in the same directory, and it has to read them all every time you load a different subset. Also, it doesn't do comments, nor does it autogenerate the archive pointers for me. However, Apache's mod_rewrite should mean that I never have to change the URL again. (Famous last words.)