For those unaware Bloxsom was/is what would today be described as a static site generator written in Perl. Like Jekyll et al it just takes plain text files and turns them into HTML in the same layout as the source files on disk.
It is very extensible and had plugins to handle things like bbCode and MediaWiki markup to embedding Amazon links from an ASIN. Before WordPress ate the blogging world it had some popularity, it didn't need a database or even CGI support.
Love Blosxom! Still using it to power my senescent blog[0]. Rael Dornfest's original Perl script was later annotated separately by Frank Hecker[1] and Rob Reed[2]. (Neat side note: according to Rob, Blosxom "played a part in my decision to go back to school to get a masters in computer science".)
Sorry about that, Tom; the blog is perhaps not quite so universally loved ;-). Over the past few decades, I've certainly received a number of spicy missives from across the political and ideological divide. One of the best things about being a tiny part of the HN community over the years has been learning from dang's example; I don't always agree with his moderation or comments, but marvel at his ability to stay unruffled in the face of extreme provocation.
This is the first time I've ever upvoted a comment about downvotes (mea culpa!); I generally downvote them on principle ("Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."[0]). I've found it best to simply comment as Providence directs and let the votes sort themselves out without any investment or expectation.
Apologies if this unsolicited advice has nudged you from fan to foe; I merely "say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say."[1]
Thanks, I do get it. I know the guidelines. Doing this occasionally is my one tiny act of civil disobedience here on HN. I think downvotes should be subject to discussion so from time to time I dole one out. Love your work BTW!
Back in college I used PHPosxom, which was "inspired" by Blosxom but I guess dynamically created pages instead of statically generating them (and of course used PHP instead of Perl, useful if PHP was more accessible/functional on your shared hosting). https://sourceforge.net/projects/phposxom/ Of course the project is super dead now.
Here's my old homepage using PHPosxom, which would be valid XHTML 1.0 if the Swarthmore College Computing Society hadn't started injecting analytics into my web site: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/nelson/
I used to serve my pages declared as XHTML from free webhosts (remember those loads of 100-ish MB hosts that kept springing up in the 2000s?) that had the added side-benefit that the injected banner adverts were not valid XHTML and therefore stripped by browsers at the time.
Back in 2001, Blogspot[1] was a good option but it had no comments (Guest Book). So, a good Russian developer approached me to try out his commenting system called something like "Blogcom". I think I used it for a year or two.
It is very extensible and had plugins to handle things like bbCode and MediaWiki markup to embedding Amazon links from an ASIN. Before WordPress ate the blogging world it had some popularity, it didn't need a database or even CGI support.