obfuscurity.
hidden in plain sight

Like any self-respecting UNIX user, I consume most of my email through the console. Mutt has been my client of choice for a few years now. I used to be a die-hard Mail.app fan on my Apple systems, but the performance was abysmal. As time went on, I evolved from running Mutt on my laptop to running it in screen on a home server. Combined with imapfilter's client-side "push filtering", this allowed me to keep my existing mailserver architecture intact (outside the scope of this post) while gaining all the functionality I missed from a traditional fat mail client.

Recently my Facebook and Twitter Attention Span Syndrome (FaTASS) has peaked, motivating me to find creative solutions for managing the extra load. Growl is a very popular notification system that Mac OS X users have enjoyed for years. I've haven't found myself wanting for it before, mainly because I don't use an abundance of GUI apps for my daily tasks. And yet, Growl's unobtrusive nature and support for network events seemed the perfect fit.

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Minor features are still being added to Blogsum. It supports searching by author (effectively treating authors like tags) and the ability to disable comment submissions. There is also readmore support, allowing you to define a portion of an article that should only be seen in full "article view". You simply insert a <!--readmore--> tag where you'd like the "preview mode" to stop.

I'm also adding email notifications for comment submissions. This way you'll know the instant a new comment requires moderation. I should be done with this very soon. The last couple of items on my To-Do list are pagination and cleaning up the template usage. Once these are complete it should be ready for submission to the OpenBSD ports framework.

Update: Email notifications for comment submissions are complete.

I've never claimed to be a prolific hacker. I take much longer to complete a simple piece of code than even your typical hobbyist programmer. I'm easily distracted by shiny objects and WTFs.

Nevertheless, I finally gave in and threw together something resembling a blogging app. There are no fancy features yet, and likely never will be. It currently does about 90% of what I want it to do, which is closer to 2% of what the typical blogging/CMS application is capable of. It's my own KISS approach with a healthy peppering of careful input handling and a simple SQLite backend.

If you've been looking for a small blog application, particularly one designed for running in OpenBSD's default httpd(8) chroot, then Blogsum might be good for you. If not, that's ok too. Let the next guy have his World Domination. I just want to blog some.

This is an in-development version of blogsum. The goal is a simple, secure blogging application that doesn't come with useless knobs or hurdles.

The anti-wordpress.