Why Blosxom?

I'm using blosxom for this blog. I'd played with it a while ago and really liked its simplicity and ethos, but never got it working quite the way I wanted. When returning to the blogging world recently I went and looked a few of the popular alternatives - Typo, Wordpress, Movable Type - and didn't find anything that really grabbed me.

Yes, all three are slicker, more modern, and have a lot more functionality out-of-the-box than blosxom, as far as I can tell. So why am I back with blosxom?

For me, blosxom has two killer features:

  • you can write your blog entries offline, using a real editor, and using nice sane rich-text formats like Markdown

  • it is simple and pluggable, by design, which makes it immensely hackable

In fact, blosxom isn't really full-blown blogging software at all, especially as it's presently packaged and distributed. Instead it's a lightweight pluggable toolkit with which to build a blog. If you're after something that Just Works, it's probably a bad choice; if you're after something you can play with and bend to your will, it's really nice.

Blosxom's also suffered a bit from not having had much development love over the last few years. Be nice to see blosxom get a bit more support for the modern blogging world - have to see if I can help stir things up a bit ...

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