Giggle

So this is Giggle, my weblog system which I’ve ripped off almost completely from Blosxom which is written in Perl. Why? Well, because I wanted to fiddle with it and didn’t want to write Perl (not that there’s anything wrong with that…).

Giggle steals the idea from Blosxom that weblog posts are just text files inside some directory on your server. There are no databases to configure and consequently the code driving the weblog is simple. The generated pages come from various flavour templates which are just text file fragments into which various bits and pieces are substituted. This lets us serve HTML pages from the HTML flavour and RSS from the RSS flavour. Giggle itself knows nothing of either (except that it has default HTML and RSS flavours built in). Kudos to Rael Dornfest for his neat design. Giggle templates are really Blosxom templates.

One reason for writing this was to revive my own blog, previously it ran on Moveable Type but that was just too dependant on various Perl modules to work on our web server. Another motivation is to be able to source the news items on my unit web pages. This is where would need to hack since I want one cgi script to serve news for all of these unit pages. So, that’s next on the list.

If anyone actually reads this and wants to get their own Giggle, the link on the left should point to a downloadable zip file. As yet there’s no documentation but you could bug me if you really wanted to.