Mod_blog: A Blogging Engine in C | Hacker News Reader

Mod_blog: A Blogging Engine in C

github.com

104 pointsingve42 comments

Was this software once popular in a particular niche? I can see recently had an update, but I'm not clear what market it is appealing to since the readme explicitly states that documentation is sparse.

I googled and found this:

> Over the 23 year history of mod_blog, I've given up on the notion of anyone other than me using it. There was only one other person who used it for just a few months before deciding blogging wasn't for him and that was way back in 2002. So it was completely by surprise that I recently received a bug report on it.

That was written a year ago.

Source: https://boston.conman.org/2023/01/19.1

These paths we take in life for the love or debugging our own code. I mean, I've been building websites with a phenomenally feature-rich system I started rolling myself around 2002 and have rewritten twice since then.(including a blogging module, shopping module, custom form+validation language, themes, and lots of stuff you actually can't get from WordPress like hierarchical inline editing for downstream users). I can build a new desktop+mobile site for a business with it in a couple hours. But no one else has ever even seen the code, let alone used it. The entire rationale for bugfixing and using it again every time has been that I don't want to be at the mercy of WP or anything else.

[mine is just in PHP and TS, though. OP's choice to do it in c++ is on an entirely different level; I'm good at flipping burgers, that person is a master chef].

I wrote my own blogging engine back in 2015. I am fairly certain I'm the only user. I actively use it to maintain two small websites.

Ask Me Anything :)

What's it written in?

Python/Flask on the server, and javascript in the browser (if requested) to do markdown->html conversion client-side

The ending with "Good luck." gave me a hearty chuckle.

I wrote my blog engine in C, but I'm a coward, it's a site generator ;)

some of the code comments are also enjoyable. For example the "Sigh" cracks me up:

  /*----------------------------------------------------------------------

  ; because the code was written using a different IO model (that is, if
  ; there's no data in the file to begin with, we automatically end up in
  ; EOF mode, let's trigger EOF.  Sigh.
  ;-----------------------------------------------------------------------*/

Oh this is fun. I'm in the process of building something similar, but I'm splitting it into two parts: the first part is a static site generator and the second is a CGI that implements the micropub spec, which can run the static site generator when it receives new content.

What makes you choose CGI as the language of choice? Just curious.

CGI is serverless without all the cloud-specific tooling.

CGI scripts can work locally, they can work on traditional shared hosts that cost peanuts to use, they even work on AWS Lambda.

What's not to like?

Looks interesting, but please OP, refactor your README in a more clear way on how can I build/tinker/use it

Thank you for sharing this..

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