BlogHead

From The Eleventh Volume

BlogHead is the name of the software that powers Jal Trellis's weblog. As of May, 2002, it also powers Sarah Dalkey's and Travis Frisby's.

History and Design

The current version is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. Trellis first wrote the program while at Maryland State University as a project for a computer science class. The first version was a very simple Python script that uploaded static files to a webserver by FTP. Trellis knew from the start that this approach was fundamentally flawed, and taught himself PHP by creating a new web-based version. That version still used static files for data storage, however, which continued to cause problems, and he switched to a MySQL database for subsequent revisions.

Trellis claims, without any real evidence, that BlogHead is the only blogware with an official mascot, the wide-eyed, oblong-headed, derby-wearing "Mr Bloghead". The resemblance to the "Mr. Men" of the eponymous series of books—which Trellis had read as a child—is obvious.

Features

For what it is, it's a reasonably powerful piece of blogware, with integrated commenting, comment and entry editing, lockable entries, cut tags for long entries, and impressive (albeit idiosyncratic) date parsing abilities. It is, however, a perennial work in progress, and it's more or less unheard of that everything works at the same time. Trellis has repeatedly promised such simple features as RSS feeds, but generally is very slow to add features he himself doesn't find particularly interesting.

This article is a stub simply because there is very little to say on the subject. It is unlikely to expand significantly.