This is the home page of the blurt 1.0 web publishing ("blogging") tool. Unlike most blogging software blurt 1.0 does not provide you with a fancy back office, heavy duty database backends and massive user management systems. Instead, you upload documents ("posts") in simple text format (.txt) to a directory on your web server. blurt will figure out the rest.
features
Out of the box, blurt 1.0 provides the following features:
- zero maintenance - well, almost. You'll still have to upload your documents (posts) to the web server, but how hard is that?
- organize your documents - creating categories for your documents (posts) is as simple as creating a subdirectory (folder) on your web server. All documents you put in such a directory are considered to be in the same category. The name of the category is the name of the subdirectory.
- easy navigation - browse documents by category or by date or by a combination of both simply by adding the required category or date to the URL of your blog. blurt 1.0 will figure out which documents you want to see.
- extend it - if you need visitors to comment on your documents or if you want to show a list of your latest documents, simply extend blurt 1.0 by installing a plugin. Installing plugins is as simple as downloading a file, changing a few settings and uploading it to a directory on your web server. blurt 1.0 will figure out the rest.
download blurt 1.0
to download blurt 1.0 click this link. Open the .tar.gz file you end up with using any half decent file archiving program (try 7Zip if you need a good free file archiving program for Windows - Mac users don't need any special software), read the readme.txt file (since you're about to install software for showing your documents on the web it is assumed you know how to read ;-)) and follow its simple instructions.
download plugins
you might find that blurt 1.0 doesn't do enough for you out of the box. In that case you'll need to install some plugins. The following plugins are available:
- AutoBR: automatically turn newlines to HTML <br> tags
- Comments : allow your visitors to comment on your documents (posts)
- LinkList : add a list of links to your web site.
- MailToFriend : allow your visitors to send the content of your documents (posts) to their friends via email
- ShowCategories : display a clickable list of all the categories in your site
- ShowLastPosts : display a clickable list of the last posts in your site or in a given category in your site.
- ShowPath : provides a way to show the current category and the current title (if applicable) in head and foot templates. Useful if you want to display them in your page title, say.
- ShowPostCategory: display the category name for each post and the url to the category of each post.
develop plugins
if you need functionality that neither blurt 1.0 nor an existing plugin provides, you can create your own plugins, that is to say, if you know how to program in Perl. If you do, you'll be happy to know that plugins for blurt 1.0 are pretty simple as far as things you program in Perl go.
miscellany
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what do i need to use blurt 1.0?
You'll need a web server that can run cgi scripts written in Perl. Unless your web server is a Windows machine, it most likely can do this
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how does blurt figure out what the title of my document
is?
blurt assumes the first non blank line in your document is the title.
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hmm ... that sounds suspiciously like ...
... blosxom, yes. blurt 1.0 is a much, much simpler recreation of blosxom's core functionality (the part where you upload text files to the web server and it displays them) extended with some document navigation and grouping features blosxom doesn't have or can't easily be extended with. That said, blosxom is a pretty awesome tool and if you need more "blog" like functionality, you're probably better off using blosxom instead of blurt 1.0.
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how much does blurt cost?
absolutely nothing. It's also public domain software, which means you can do just about anything you want with it: install it, modify it, resell it, whatever you want.
