Exploring the crypt

First let me begin by explaining how Blosxom does blurging:

You basically stick a plain old text file in a certain directory and it reads it, adds some html sugar to it, and returns it to the web browser.

My blosxom home directory is blosxom/library...everything I put in library just shows up. Everything I put in library/blurg shows up with [/blurg] next to the name (you may have seen that).

Ergo, anything I put in the /crypt directory will have [/crypt] next to it. I've decided to separate the archives into years, so to get to posts from 2003, you just go to /crypt/2003...and so on.

Now, one minor limitation to this is that blosxom decides what to display based on what the last modified timestamp of the file is. So, if I put a new file into /crypt, it will see that and assume it's the "most recent" post and stick it on the front page, even though that may not be what I want. To circumvent that, I've written a little script that modifies the files (in reverse order) in /blurg, so the most recent "real" posts will be at the beginning.

The problem with that is that every time I run the reordering script, the timestamps are changed (duh) but blosxom doesn't know the original timestamp, so it displays all past posts as if I made them today. That's ok for now, but it will screw up archive browsing in the future, so I'm trying to figure out a way around it.

Browsing: To jump to a category, just add the path to the URL. In other words, to see all chocolate related posts: http://mckay.marston.ws/chocolate, dreams: http://mckay.marston.ws/dreams.

To view archive posts it's slightly different. Just add "old" to the beginning of the year, like this: to view posts from 2004, enter this into your browser: http://mckay.marston.ws/crypt/old2004, 2003:http://mckay.marston.ws/crypt/old2003. To view everything from the crypt: http://mckay.marston.ws/crypt.

Comments: I have a form of comments now, but it hasn't been heavily tested, so I can't guarantee it will work. Also, I know that the comments are ugly, I haven't prettied them up yet. I haven't disabled posts on articles from the crypt, but be aware that the posts are up to 5 years old and probably not really comment-worthy.

And the work continues.