Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Obscure blog software you might not be aware of

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 21:16 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:13 IST)

In this series < Previous Next >
I thought it would be fun to compile a list of blogging tools that not many people might be aware of. Mind you, most of them are for the hardcore geek-types and all of them are not your run-of-the-mill PHP/MySQL driven CMS type blogging solutions. Most of them publish static, fully self-contained websites, but in a blog format. I think a few of them are also dead projects, not having been updated in years.

But it is interesting to check out. Here are a few I found out (mainly using Debian's package manager).

Blosxom - This is described as a lightweight, yet feature rich blogging tool. Mind you, it's written in Perl, so I guess not many present day bloggers would be comfortable dabbling with CGI scripts and such.

hobix - This one is odd. That's all I can say about that. Check out the website and prepare to be stunned. :))

chronicle - This one is described as a tool that will convert a directory of text files into a blog with an RSS feed. Appropriately called a blog compiler.

nanoblogger - This is a blog tool that you use entirely from the UNIX command line. It relies on no database, no GUI, nothing except a few simple UNIX command line tools to generate a complete blog-like static website. It does support plugins which sounds interesting.

tDiary - This one seems to be another online diary generator powered by Ruby. The original site is in Japanese, so I'm linking to the Debian package page.

I've not tried or tested any of these tools, except nanoblogger (very perfunctorily). But I always enjoy discovering such hobbyist software projects that never make it to the mainstream.

In this series

14 comment(s)

  1. Wow, there are some strange and exotic finds here. I'd be a little scared to try any of them, to be honest :)

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 03:39 IST #
  2. Troy, most of them are just harmless HTML generators if you think about it. So you could try them out if you have the time and inclination.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 06:50 IST #
  3. Perhaps scared is the wrong word to use, although I still wouldn't trust my blog to something that isn't likely to ever be updated.

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 07:32 IST #
  4. Troy, that's true, although since blog tools like nanoblogger generate static HTML, you are guaranteed that the site will work independent of the blog software used in this case.

    Also you cannot get better security against hackers than 100% pure HTML with no scripts involved. :>>

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 07:46 IST #
  5. You've given me an idea for an April fools post... hint txt file as blogging engine. It's fully customizable :)

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 08:20 IST #
  6. Man, don't reveal them here. ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 08:25 IST #
  7. Hehehe...

    I'd rather use Notepad+ to make my static blog. Of course, no commenting, pinging, or RSS feeds would be allowed.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 12:57 IST #
  8. RT, actually some of these static blogs do support RSS feeds. Of course you can always implement commenting using HaloScan or some other comment service :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 13:04 IST #
  9. that hobix site is indeed a sight/site to see!

    Obscure is definitely the word to use here!

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 18:23 IST #
  10. Titanium geek, will you use to ta pawaar your blaaagh?

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Feb 16, 2008 @ 18:28 IST #
  11. How on earth do you discover these?

    And thanks for the tip about hobix: I was warned! :D

    Comment by Sudipta Chatterjee (visitor) on Sun, Feb 17, 2008 @ 06:12 IST #
  12. Sudipta, I discovered them using Debian's package manager. Yes, I was bored. :>>

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Feb 17, 2008 @ 06:52 IST #
  13. Thanks for posting this. I used nanoblogger couple of years ago, then lost it, then forgot about it, then I needed it again and couldn't remember it's name or where to get it from. Thanks to you I now (will) have a nanoblog again.

    Comment by Mike E (visitor) on Tue, May 10, 2011 @ 04:08 IST #
  14. Those blogging tools is very useful for me. Thank you very muchu!

    Comment by DVDGPS (visitor) on Wed, Jun 1, 2011 @ 12:43 IST #

Comments closed

The blog owner has closed further commenting on this entry.