It would appear that Bash Blogger was featured on Linux.com on June 27, 2007.
Scott Nesbitt is very kind. He wrote about Bash Blogger on his personal blog in 2005, and now he gives Bash Blogger another glowing endorsement this year on Linux.com.
Since Scott has been so nice, I feel bad about pointing out a couple of corrections to his article. I can't really blame him, there's virtually no documentation, but maybe this will keep someone from thinking that they're going crazy if Bash Blogger doesn't behave exactly the way it was described.
One, and this isn't really a correction, more of a clarification, you can use absolutely any editor you want to use with Bash Blogger. The only trick is, you need to turn off auto-backups in your editor or it will sprinkle backup files in the config directory that will hose a site rebuild. Again, nothing major but, Kate, gedit and gnotepad+ all tend to save backups of the file they're editing by default. I forget how to turn the backups off, but then again, I'm a pretty hardcore vim user, so I really don't use those editors.
The one correction is the part about the theme installation. The themes don't actually go into the config directory (~/.bashblogger/templates), although that's not a terribly bad idea (thanks again Scott), the themes are actually a directory named after the theme containing a CSS stylesheet and the images associated with that theme. The theme folder actually goes in the ROOTDIR (where your website lives, /var/www or something), in a directory called "theme".
The reason the theme goes into the "theme" directory in your ROOTDIR is because the webserver needs to be able to find these files to apply them to your website. Hope that makes sense.
The templates directory is actually where the (x)html framework lives. I originally had all of the (x)html inside of the bblog script. The reason I created the templates folder was because people wanted their websites to do things I hadn't thought they'd want to do. There wasn't an easy way for people to put their FOAF info in the header site-wide, or to add those annoying social bookmarking links to the bottom of every article. The templates folder exposes all of the (x)html guts to the user where they can make changes to the (x)html code and make their site look the way they want.
I've been working on 0.3.6 and I've migrated to HTML5 based on what information I could glean from the WHATWG and from viewing the source of Mark Pilgrim's site. There will also be templates for HTML 4.01 and XHTML (1.0 transitional and 1.1) in the future. Hopefully not too long after 0.3.6 is posted to the site.
I've sent pre-releases to a few people and I hope to hear from them in a couple of days. I've got a couple of more ideas I want to shoehorn into the next release and, barring any major problems with the current pre-release, there should be a 0.3.6 tarball on the site before August.
One last thing, I've heard several requests for more themes. Creating attractive themes is not one of my strong points. So, I'm toying with the idea of maybe having a theme competition. I'll be buying the prize out of my own pocket, so no iPod or iPhone or anything. You'll have to use one of the free licenses (GPLv2, BSD or something). I dunno. Let's see if I get any interest.
Posted by Phil McClure in General on July 15, 2007