Installing Blosxom

Now that you have Blosxom, you’re just a few short steps away from your first blog entry. Customizing Blosxom for your particular environment requires just a couple of simple configuration changes. Open the blosxom script in your favorite text editor.

First make sure the first line of the script (#!/usr/bin/perl -w) correctly identifies the location of your Perl interpreter. If you’re unsure and have access to the command line, type:

% which perl
/usr/local/bin/perl

Copy and paste the resulting output after the #! in the blosxom script (e.g., #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w). If you don’t have access to the command line, ask your service provider or system administrator for help. Be sure there’s no space between the #! and the path to Perl.

About the only thing Blosxom really needs to know is where you keep your blog entries. Change the $datadir line from:

my $datadir = '/Library/WebServer/Documents/blosxom';

to the appropriate directory path. For Mac OS X and Unix users, we recommend something alongside your web server’s document directory:

my $datadir = '/Library/WebServer/Data/blosxom';

or:

my $datadir = '/usr/local/apache/data/blosxom';

Under Windows, somewhere like:

my $datadir = 'c:\Inetpub\wwwdata\blosxom';

If you’ll be running Blosxom on your service provider’s web server, somewhere in your home directory will do nicely:

my $datadir = '/home/sam/blosxom';

Wherever you choose, just be sure the directory is readable by the web server.

That said, you probably don’t want to put ...

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