What is this stuff?

A blog, short for Web log, is a community site where users post logs of their day to day activities.

The Simple Blog is here for developers (and others) to post status of their projects, or just rant and rave about whatever is on their mind. Consider it a free speech area without the brick pedastals.

What do I need to use this?

To read blog entries, you just need a web server - which is obvious if you're reading this now. To post entries, you need a blog client. Currently there is only 1 blog client - logit, a perl script designed to run on Unix systems.

Installing logit

Just copy logit to any directory listed in your $PATH. To you use it, just type logit -i. This will create a local log file (under $HOME/lib/logs) as well as submit the entry to the blog server.

Configuring your environment

To use logit, you need to set a couple of environment variables.

  1. EDITOR - This variable tells logit which text editor to launch to create your log entries. The editor needs to be able to write ordinary text files. Logit will take care of parsing information from that file for the blog server.
  2. PAGER - This variable tells logit which pager to use when viewing your log files locally. This way you can use logit -v or logit -vp (for the previous days log) to view log files in their text format, ie without the web interface. To see the full range of options, try logit -?.

    Registering with the Web interface

    Before you can submit entries to the blog server, you need to register with the blog. This is a straight forward process and is only required to match your submissions with the directories where log information is stored. It also makes it easier to display useful information on the Web site.

    That's it. Try it! It's fun!