RogBlog

RogBlog is a quick and dirty blogging program I hacked together because I was dissatisfied with the alternatives.

This is a simple system for maintaining a blog. The goals were:

• Simplicity.
• Use static web pages with plain vanilla html. No CGI or server-side includes.
• Write text with ordinary editor and use html tags as needed.
• Use a template for page layout.
• Automatically track dates, merge html, and upload to server.
• Easily test html offline.
• Archive monthly.

To use RogBlog, you need:

• A computer with a text editor, Perl interpreter, and internet connection.
• A web server for plain HTML files, and FTP access.
• A rudimentary familiarity with HTML and Perl.

The way it works is that you maintain two (or more) HTML files, frame.htm and posts1.htm. Your header and sidebar links appear in frame.htm. Each time you want to post a new message to your blog, you append it to the end of posts1.htm, and put <hr> on a line by itself at the end. Then you run the Perl program rogblog.pl to create index.htm and the monthly archive files. The program keeps track of the dates and times of the postings in a file called posts.csv. You can also keep your messages in several HTML files, if you like.

If you want links, boldface, fonts, colors, and other HTML niceties, you are on your own to insert these. You can insert the html tags yourself, or use an html editor.

For a demo, see my blog. I run it from a Windows 2000 machine, but you could use Unix or Mac just as well.

Download: rogblog.zip

License: open-source freeware

Bugs and limitations: