Blogofile

A couple of years after I wrote about how happy I was with Blogofile, it stopped being developed. The last update on GitHub was in 2015, the owner has archived the repository, and Blogofile.com doesn’t answer anymore. I looked for forks and didn’t find any active ones. So as much as I liked the look and feel of my blog, it was going to have to switch software to something that was supported. I looked at several different options but the only one written in Python that seemed active was Pelican. ...

Because Blogofile(at least the 0.7.1 version I’m using) regenerates every file and directory every time it makes it hard to update just the changed files on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high So I wrote a shell script that updates only the changed files and also pings GooglePing so that Google and other services come along and read your update. Over time, the difference between what the old page 2 on S3 has and what it should be will build. There’s a simple answer, which is to just upload all of the page files. ...

In Switched from WordPress to Blogofile there are two good things about using Blogofile: flat files are almost impossible to hack Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high There’s some downsides: blogofile build seems to copy or regenerate every single file it’s not totally happy being on S3 - it doesn’t make index.html files for the archive and category directories. there’s no easy way to post-via-email or send a link to start a post Right now I’m writing this with vi and that’s far less comfortable than WordPress’s editor which I really liked. But I’m sure I’ll find TextWrangler or something as suitable for writing blog posts.

I really like WordPress for the huge number of themes and utilities that it has. What I don’t like, though, is the need for constant vigilance to make sure that your blog hasn’t been hacked. When I started the conversion, I found two blog posts that had been secretly altered so that they had links to spam sites. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful that only two had been altered or disappointed that my blog mattered so little that that’s all they did. ...