Weblog 1.6 - Mother of Perl

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Weblog 1.6

Weblog Update

Based on your feedback, Weblog 1.6 includes several bug fixes, simplified installation procedures, better RSS 1.0 support, and better documentation. This tutorial walks through the new installation procedures and supersedes the previous Weblog tutorial. I will continue to add new features and fix bugs based on your feedback. Also, drop me a note and a link to your site if you're using the Weblog successfully.

Overview

Weblog is a simple browser-based interface for managing one or more RSS channels. It's also capable of generating HTML, Palm and WML files from the RSS file. Templates are included for HTML, Palm, and WML output so you can customize the output for your channels.

Weblog can be used in several different ways. By default, Weblog will be installed so that the URL for its output will be https://www.yourdomain.com/webnews where webnews is the name of the channel and yourdomain.com is your domain name. This is a simple way to maintain an RSS channel whose output can be included via Server Side Includes.

Additionally, because Weblog gives you full control of the templates for each channel, the output may include your complete site styles and the output can be linked to and used as a regular section of your Web site.

Weblog can also be used to maintain a Web site that is itself a Weblog. This is done by configuring Weblog to sit at the root of your Web server. So the index.html page that it generates would be your home page. In fact, this is what I've been using for perlxml.com for a while now as well as an internal Weblog we use at XIF Communications.

Weblog includes the ability to maintain multiple channels. This is useful when you want to allow one or more editors to maintain their own Weblogs of information or sections of a site. In this instance, each channel would have its own top URL /myweblog or /yourweblog for example.

Another nice feature of the Weblog is that it can output many different formats. And you only have to maintain one source. Since the data file is RSS, you can share this data file with other Web sites who can include your Weblog on their site.

If you have additional ideas for features or modifications or would like to contribute, feel free to send me feedback.

Where to get Weblog

The best place to grab Weblog is right here at Mother of Perl.

Download weblog-1.61.tar.gz

Bug Fix: 010106: Netscape chokes on the 0.91 file produced using the old 1.6 weblog.pl (no language tag), this is due to a minor bug, which is now fixed in 1.61 above. As a temporary fix, we added the following line to weblog.pl in the distribution (1.61 above), in the subroutine "generate_RSS" under the line:

	$dc->{'subject'  } = &encode(param('csubject'  )) if param('csubject');
 
 add the following line:
 
 	$rss->channel(language => 'en-us');

Weblog will continue to be maintained and supported by XIF Communications (xif.com), the company I work for. Weblog is being released under the GNU license. This means you can use the product for free (of course). We plan on adding many more features and would like to get your feedback (and patronage).