Diesen Beitrag meinerseits, in dahingeworfenen Englisch und ein klein wenig adaptiert, habe ich anschließend nach ein paar gelesenen Mails heute morgen in die Blosxom-Community gestellt. Es wird Zeit, das gesamte Projekt rund um diese Blog-Engine sozusagen revitalisierend zu hinterfragen.
Und er setzt den von mir bereits früher nieder geschriebenen Beitrag “Blosxoms Tod” fort.
“Mh, again some other Blosxom-Users switched to WordPress… their reasons: “Missing mobile phone support (Android or iPhone-Apps), quick-upload from text & images via smartphone or tablet, restrictive ftp-possibilities at the office and the lack of available and good-looking templates.” Also some of them quote, that they can’t use and find ready-made plugins like lightbox, twitter-integration, comment-support, mobile themes and similar without “playing around” (hacking).
This are the similar problems, that I have (again) with blosxom in the last days. For some other projects I use now as an example Getsimple CMS or Monstra CMS, both are using static files (similar to textfiles) and don’t need a database, but provide a nice backend – and I still also can drop the whole site on another server or (sub)folders. Plugins are available too, like for blogging, galleries, comments and so on – and they grow.”
“Another problem that I discovered: many writers, who use also other static engines like jekyll, ruby-stuff and similar (there are now hundreds of them, some of them are really good) stop blogging – it’s interesting: as soon, as they switched from wordpress, typepad, serendipity,… to the a static blog-engine (the “hype” of static blogs), their engagement and their numbers of postings and articles decreases constantly. Many of the e.g. Jekyll-driven sites are stopped after a while, one article every few weeks and so on… (just look through the long site-participants-list at jekyll @ github!).
At the moment I’m playing around with/updating (maybe/or not) my Muli.cc-Blosxom site and also looking through the plugins – but it’s really a code-mess. About 50% of the plugins are not usable… missing parts, no manuals/documentation or examples. 80% of the support- or founder/creator-links are dead – and there are many errors and mistakes in the code. And we know, that there is no really active community at the moment, where you can get support or examples.
Also some users have problems with the “old” CGI-Support and sadly the (german) development of BlogZen (Blosxom2) has stopped completely (without a real start of the project).
I think more and more, without a complete rewrite of blosxom and a basic-support of plug in and play-templates, OS-independent (!) backend/administration-surface and similar – and without the support of the growing market of tablets, smartphones – let’s use the keyword “App” – it’s hopeless, to push up blosxom again. :(
It still will be a small “hacker”-perl-engine, the small rest of these users still know how to use it and make/made their own development and code-changes… but every few weeks, one of them switch to another (textfile-)engine. We can find some development around blosxom in japan and other asia-parts today, but still it’s also there a small, little amount of people.
And at the moment, new “remixes” of blosxom are mostly built in ruby and similar – and so the decision-gap between blosxom or jekyll and other, similiar blog-engines disappears more and more.
It’s a sad story, because I love Blosxom and it’s simplicity. And I think, there is (or not?) maybe room for a development and a new chance… but then, when I (as old-boy blosxom-blogger) stand somewhere at the train station or relax in a coffee-shop, I just open the e.g. wordpress-app on my smartphone, two clicks/touchs and I can post text, photos, videos, barcamp-podcasts – and ready. Touch and play (blog).
Blosxom… my love… it’s difficult to be faithful these days.”
Fortsetzung und Auszug:
Yes, true – this are reasons, why I also like & love blosxom. It’s dead-simple, but you can still “work” on it too and it has the other “way of blogging”. And yes, the rudimentary of blosxom is nice and for “technic people” like us, one of the best ways to keep playing and going on with stuff.
So – true. But for the mass of users this isn’t the right way – so this also means, that the actual amount of work with filtering, checking and working on the project now and the plugins isn’t really countervailing anymore.
At the moment only every three or four days, sometimes in one week, one or two users download a plugin at muli.cc, came back a little bit later, try to download another version of it (first try failed?) – and that’s it. The visits & downloads die and decrease more and more – from month to month.
Also the gap between some new ruby-static-engines or some of the new static-cms-engines in php and similar… and blosxom… is barely-there. There is the same feeling, there are the same possibilities and the same kind of blogging with textfiles (textile, markdown) – and there is no difference between a copy & past plugin-file (blosxom) or a download-plugin-file (static engine) – in both examples it’s just a kind of textfile – so the way and amount of work/procedure is the same.
I’m one of the biggest fans of blosxom, this is also the reason for the muli.cc-project and similar, but more and more I also realize, that without a fast and complete rewrite (Perl-Adaption) and some candys for new users, there is no reason for them to use blosxom, because they can reach the same way of blogging with other static engines (and still can work on the code, plugins, templates and improve their skills – or let it run without updates like blosxom), but have a modern layout, fresh community, support and so on – or if they are technics or hackers, they just write their own console/ruby/php/js/-whatever engine today. Look at Github – it’s exploding by hundreds and more static blog-engines with textfiles.
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Essential candys for new users should be a small amount/selection of modern, nice and clean (and responsive) templates, a dead-simple (and running) version of a wordpress-import-plugin and other-plugin-independent plugins with the support for disqus and similar comment-systems, drag & drop social-integration (facebook, twitter…). This would reduce the inhibition level of new users = active community.