It's starting to shape up around here. I still have "some stuff left to do":http://mrbobowski.com/blog/exclude/bloglist.html (and I'm sure I'll find more as I go). So far, I've taken the "Notebook Chaos WordPress theme":http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/20/notepad-chaos-a-free-wordpress-theme/ by "Evan Eckard":http://www.evaneckard.com/ and started converting it to something Blosxom can use. I'm using the "theme plugin":http://blosxom.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/blosxom/blosxom2-plugins/general/theme?view=log rather than try to make it happen as a flavour. I had a little trouble initially because we ("Webserver Maswan":http://www.acc.umu.se/~maswan/ really, since I don't want to be responsible for breaking Apache) had initially set up Blosxom in the Apache configuration to handle all requests from the document root on down. (He claims he asked me if I was sure that was what I wanted and that I said, "Yes." I recall none of that conversation.) End result: theme components like images weren't loading properly. I think Blosxom was trying to treat them as flavours. We fixed it (Webserver Maswan again, but I like to pretend that I had some involvement beyond "Aargh, honey! It doesn't work! Make it work!") by changing the path in the Apache configuration to only apply to a subdirectory. That's the reason for the /blog/ bit in the URL. Eventually I'll probably make a nice page with a link to the blog. Right now there's a redirect sending everyone coming in the front door over here. Evan Eckard did a singularly awesome thing in packaging Notebook Chaos. Besides making the PSDs available for download, he included a static HTML master, which was an enormous boon in creating a page file for the Blosxom theme. I was expecting to have to dig through the bowels of various WordPress theme component files, but the bones of what I needed were right there in pristine HTML. Thank you, Evan! The next thing I had to do was figure out the sidebar. I'm a big fan of tagging. I think it's the logical step beyond categories, and the way Blosxom implements categories, and with the variety of plugins available to do things to them, I thought it would be easier to just forego categories altogether and use tags. I already organize notes to myself that way: a loose directory structure where only clearly defined subcategories get their own directory and a "tags" line in each file that makes it easy to search. The hard-coded category path is too inflexible for me. It leaves me pondering questions that I'd rather just not think about, like: "Should I set up my path as software/linux/ubuntu/fluxbox? But Fluxbox isn't limited to Ubuntu. And what about hardware? Linux drivers should reasonably be categorized under both hardware and software." End digression. I decided to forget about categories, at least for the time being, and set up the "tagging plugin":http://blosxom.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/blosxom/blosxom2-plugins/xtaran/tagging?view=log instead. I like it because it has the ability to show related, etc. This requires the meta plugin, too, but I'll need that anyway if I decide to implement comments. (I haven't taken the links off the theme yet, but I'm not sure how much commenting I really want. More on that later.) The tagging plugin works pretty well, but there are some quirks. Its $tagging::global_tag_list function is what creates the tag cloud in the "categories" section of the sidebar. The plugin is supposed to handle styling, so you can have those fancy tag clouds you see with the varied colors and sizes that indicate the number of posts carrying that label. For some reason, that is still unknown to me, it's not styling properly when it displays the main page or posts in the root of the $datadir. It does work correctly for displaying posts in subdirectories. (Compare the "main page":http://mrbobowski.com/blog/ with the "library book list":http://mrbobowski.com/blog/exclude/librarybooks.html for an example.) I haven't pinpointed the problem yet, but I did do a temporary modification of the CSS to do some basic styling of the tag cloud on the front page, because it was really ugly completely unstyled. I may see if I can modify it to show the number of posts in parentheses, rather than changing color or size. Future plans also involve using "interpolate_fancy":http://blosxom.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/blosxom/blosxom2-plugins/general/interpolate_fancy?view=log to display related posts on the sidebar using the tagging plugin. I'm all over the place in what I write about, so I think "recent posts" is of limited value. People interested in my "deviled egg recipe":http://mrbobowski.com/blog/recipes/090411-devileggs.html would probably rather see more recipes or cooking posts than read about the underpinnings of my blog. I certainly would, and first and foremost it's about making my blog a useful archive of information for _me_. So I decided to dedicate "recent posts" to my "Twitter status":http://twitter.com/mrbobowski (which may include recent blog posts too, if I can fix Blosxom's RSS feed so that "Twitterfeed":http://www.twitterfeed.com can use it). Blosxom's plugin repository on SourceForge is a little out of date. As far as I can tell, nothing has been touched in over a year. I found the "twitter plugin":http://code.google.com/p/bit-tools/downloads/list via Google. The twitter plugin is basically what I wanted, but out of the box, it has the disadvantage of dumping a bunch of junk from the XML feed onto the screen. You can see what I mean "here":http://www.spacecoastweb.org/blog/about/colophon -- notice how the status message and date is followed by a duplication of the status message and a bunch of other unneccessary stuff? That's what I didn't want. I looked at the Perl myself for a while, but I couldn't figure it out, so I said, "Aargh, honey! It doesn't work! Make it work!" and Perl God Maswan fixed it by doing some sort of arcane regular expressions magic. He also did something to make the URL linkage work correctly. If you're looking for the changes, "his infrequently updated blog":http://bloggis.se/maswan/91183 has a link to the modified file. The other problem I had with the twitter plugin is that curl wasn't installed on the server (I know, right?) and it just showed up blank. It didn't give me any indication of why it didn't work, which I expected given the other error handling it included. It did create its cache file, sans curl, so it took me a while to realize that installing curl had actually fixed the problem. After I deleted the plugin's cache file in the state directory, it worked swimmingly. The last major thing I've done to make the sidebar spiffy is to set up the links section. That's not included in the master HTML template I mentioned earlier, I went to the sidebar.php file to find it and inserted it into the page file for the Blosxom theme. Under the static links, I'm using the "deloxom plugin":http://negatendo.net/projects/blosxom/deloxom/deloxom-plugin.html to show some of my recent bookmarks. At the bottom is the "meta" section, with some stuff. I just love Evan's "misc debris" label so much, I had to use it. That's the theme related stuff. I still have a bunch more to do, but everything I need is basically working, and I'm kind of websited-out right now, so it will probably be a couple weeks before I get back to it. More on setting up the blog later.