Blosxom Plugins - UnixDaemon: In search of (a) life

Blosxom (pronounced “blossom”) is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind. From the Blosxom Homepage.

My own Unixdaemon Blog is powered by Blosxom and while it is more than adequate for most of my needs, its small codebase and powerful plugin architecture make it very easy to extend with small chunks of code. Whether you want to change parts of its behaviour or just tweak it to suit your own working style, with half a dozen lines of Perl the customisation oppotunities are amazing.

Below you will find some of my plugins that make Blosxom work the way I want it to or add custom features. All of the plugins below are released under the GPL and can be used anywhere the license permits. I hope you find them useful.

Blosxom Plugin: Bugzilla Tag: One of the small developer blogs I host has a number of people linking to, and complaining about, the bugs present in different Free Software projects. After watching one of them open a text file, dig through the links, pull out the wrong one and eventually get the right URL I decided to write a small Blosxom plugin to make the process easier.

The Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin lets you define shortcuts to a number of Bugzilla servers, and a default one, which you can then link to using the following syntax in your blosxom posts:

<bug "redhat">117894</bug><br> <bug "mozilla">84752</bug>

For full details have a look at the Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin source.

Blosxom Plugin: Google Maps Tag: Linking to Google maps is nice. Jumping through the hoops to get the target URL isn't so much. The Google Maps Tag Blosxom Plugin allows you to use either a raw postcode (it's built for the UK) or a named location that will expand out to a full Google Maps URL.

You can use any of these short cuts:

<gmap "office">
<a href="gmap:EC1V 3QR">
<gmap>EC1V 3QR</gmap>

For full details have a look at the Google Maps Tag Blosxom Plugin source. Note: The links generated by this plugin use maps.google.co.uk, if you don’t like this (if you want to use the American site for example) then hack the source.

Blosxom Plugin: Immediate Action Feeds: The Blosxom Immediate Action Feeds Plugin adds a number of links to the bottom of each blosxom post; both HTML and RSS flavours. These links allow easy interaction with a number of online services. This version of the plugin adds links for del.icio.us, Digg and reddit.

When one of the links is clicked it takes the user to the site and attempts to autofill as many of the required fields as possible. For more details see either the POD at the bottom of the source code or the README contained in the Compressed version of the Immediate Action Feeds plugin

This was first posted ‘Sat Jan 28 16:44:03 2006’ by Dean Wilson

Blosxom Plugin: Digg Me!: The digg_me plugin changes each post (both RSS and HTML flavours) and adds a clickable link that takes you to a pre-populated "Submit a story to Digg" page. And fills in the URL and title for you.

The Digg Me! source code is pretty simple (mostly the same as the Reddit and del.icio.us plugins) but you’ll probably need to change the ‘$post_url’ to suit your sites permalink format. The code’s GPL'd and I’ve tested it on my own site so it mostly works.

Blosxom Plugin: submit_to_reddit: The submit_to_reddit plugin changes each post (both RSS and HTML flavours) and adds a clickable link that takes you to a pre-populated "Submit to reddit" page.

The submit_to_reddit source code is pretty simple (mostly the same as the previous plugin) but you’ll probably need to change the ‘$post_url’ to suit your sites permalink format. The code’s GPL'd and I’ve tested it on my own site so it mostly works.

Blosxom Plugin: add_to_delicious: The add_to_delicious plugin was inspired by an xml.com article, called Putting RSS to Work: Immediate Action Feeds, which made the very sensible suggestion of allowing you to "do things" to RSS items without leaving your aggregator. This plugin changes each post (both RSS and HTML flavours) and adds a clickable link that takes you to a pre-populated "add link to del.icio.us" page.

The add_to_delicious source code is pretty simple but you’ll probably need to change the ‘$post_url’ to suit your sites permalink format. The code’s GPL'd and running on my own site so it mostly works.

Blosxom Plugin: cpan_module_tag: This extension allows you to link to CPAN modules in your blog posts without performing the tedious steps of looking up the module, getting the URL, putting it in an <a href=""> etc. You can specify a link to a module using any of the following shortcuts:

<cpan "Data::Transactional">
<a href="cpan:Net::Random">
<cpan>Tie::Scalar::Decay</cpan>

And it will be translated in to a full <a href=”"> that points to the module on CPAN. Here’s the GPL'd cpan_module_tag source code.

Blosxom Plugin: raa_tag: This extension allows you to link to Ruby Application Archive hosted projects in your blog posts without performing the tedious steps of looking up the module, getting the URL, putting it in an <a href=""> etc. The code is very similar to the cpan_module_tag plugin as they do almost identical tasks, just with different target URLs in the output. You can specify a link to a project using any of the following shortcuts:

<raa "net-ssh">
<a href="raa:needle">
<raa>copland</raa>

And it will be translated in to a full <a href=”"> that points to the module on the Ruby Application Archive. Here’s the GPL'd raa_tag source code.