Bashblogger's design is inspired by the following:
Cool URIs An excellent article by Tim Berners-Lee on persista nce of URIs.
Semantic Markup In a nutshell, semantic markup means separating struc ture from presentation. For example, take a look at what a typical Bash Blogger page looks like without CSS. The document is structured so that it can be viewed by any number of web-enabled devices and it degra des gracefully to allow users of text-based browsers, or screen readers for the blind, to read your website.
cssZenGarden cssZenGarden operates on the premise that s eparating structure from presentation is really a "good thing™". Graphic artists are invited to submit their own CSS designs but not alter the underl ying HTML in any way.
Breadcrumbs Breadcrumb navigation hints were inspired by Dr. Jakob Nielsen.
Background I originally wrote Bash Blogger so I could write rough drafts for my blog. My intention was to write a little bash script to handle all of the formatting and archive each article so that I could come back later and work on it whenever I wanted. I was looking for something on the commandline so that I could SSH into my machine at home and pound out thoughts quickly that I could flesh out later when I had more time. I also didn't wa nt to have to reinstall, reconfigure and harden Apache and then install and configure MySQL and then the blogging software, blah, blah, blah...
It's snowballed over time and my priorities have shifted from writing a little script to write rough drafts for somebody else's blogging software into ex panding my little script into blogging software in it's own right.
I've written Bash Blogger to be standards compliant. I'm still working on improving in this area, but so far Bash Blogger produces XHTML 1.1 compliant c ode. It also produces semantically correct pages and uses valid CSS for visual styling.
I've made and effort to follow the guidlines laid out in the W3C's article Cool URI's don't change. The URI's produced by Bash Blogger follow the format, http://yourdomainname.org/archives/year/month/day/article_titl e/. Therefore, once you publish a new article, you can change the article title, but not the URI. This prevents linkrot and adds to the value of a sit e over time. I've also included a method for disabling this feature in the bblog.conf file for users who wish to use Bash Blogger as a private journal on t heir own machine.