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:

To use RogBlog, you need:

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:

  • Only one blogger recognized.
  • Always uploads all the files, including unchanged archives.
  • Deleting a post must be done manually, and is awkward.
  • The messages are tracked using the source file name, the count of the messages in the file, and the date and time of posting. This can causes problems in some cases, but is good enough for my purposes.

    Other features:

  • Creates and uploads an RSS (XML) feed.
  • Notifies Weblogs.com of each new post.

    Instructions:

  • Make sure Perl is installed.
  • Unzip the files to a working directory.
  • Edit frame.htm to customize your blog with your title, links, etc.
  • Add a message to posts1.htm.
  • Create a batch file (or unix script) to run rogblog.pl with your FTP account info on the command line.
  • Upload.

    If you use the program for a blog, drop me a note. I might give you a link on my blog. Email: rogerschlafly@mindspring.com