What Goes Around
Back when I started this blog my Internet service provider was Comcast, which didn’t support any scripting of the web server. So, I used a rather simple tool, bloxsom, that could generate all of the HTML pages and the XML news feed which I would then upload via FTP. Before long I started using another provider and launched dolben.org to serve the blog as well as a family tree and a few software doodads. In subsequent years I used a few different popular blogging systems including Movable Type and Blogger. I gave up on Movable Type and switched to Blogger after the blog was hacked for the second time. Blogger provided a mode in which it used FTP to load the generated web files onto my server. I had decided to avoid having any blogging application on my server that could be attacked. But then Blogger ended its publishing via FTP.
That’s when I returned to generating the content on my home computer and uploading it to my server. I looked at a few existing tools for doing that, including once again bloxsom, which hasn’t changed since I first used it. In the end it seemed to me that it would be easier to write a little tool myself than to deal with their arcane and poorly documented customization interfaces. Indeed the generator I wrote has only a couple of hundred lines of python code.
My apologies to anyone whose feed aggregator (like mine, Google Reader) has given them a few fresh copies of the last dozen entries over the past couple of days as I tweaked my generator.
posted @ 11:02 AM EDT
