Perl-ing your Blogs.

(From Network Computing Asian Edition)

Byline: Dr Seamus Phan

Weblogs, or blogs, have become the underground movement for online journalism. With blogs, it is very easy for users who have no experience in writing HTML code, or using visual HTML editing tools such as Macromedia DreamWeaver MX, to upload Web content.

It is done by using nothing more than glorified text editors with FTP (file transfer protocol), or even through the new breed of GUI-based blog writing and upload tools with a Web browser.

If you examine some of the blog editing tools closely, you will see that they are nothing more than repackaged text editors with a simple FTP client included. If you are familiar with C++, Java or Cocoa programming, you are likely to be able to write such a tool in under one day flat. The code may not be pretty and there may be specific GUI quirks depending on your operating environment, but I suspect that the tool will work.

Rael Dornfest, a researcher at O'Reilly & Associates, has a simple and elegant Perl blog script, which I have used in this example. It remains one of the simplest blog scripts I have seen, although in the future we may even have simpler PHP versions. If you need to integrate the blog uploads to a calendar, you may have to patch the script to accept Javascript or Perl calendar scripts.

Parameters for editing