Fighting obsolescence

Now that I’m getting into the swing of blojsom on OS/X I’m starting to see the flaws in the pre-packaged software — and the improvements. Apple choose not to just drop blojsom into OS/X. There are some pretty heavy customizations.

I was disappointed to see that 10.4.1 has a fairly old blojsom installation (2.14, while the rest of the world is up to 2.25). On the other hand, Apple put a significant effort into making blojsom easier to use and — at least in my opinion — more attractive because of it. Along the way, though, Apple had to change the way blojsom works.

It took me a while to figure out how to turn image references back on. If you use a package like MarsEdit you’ll notice right off that image embedding just doesn’t seem to work. Fortunately this is easy enough to solve, though it would have been nice of Apple to document their unique configuration. Most blog clients expect images to show up in a resources/ folder. To make this work I edited /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and added the line:

JKMount /resources/* blojsomworker

In the IfModule mod_jk.c section. Now I’m able to use MarsEdit’s image upload tools and inspector, which creates embedded URIs like <img src=“http://domain.com/resources/zbeckman/image.gif”>.

Another immediate problem was the lack of an administrative interface. By adding ?flavor=admin to our blog URI, we should be able to login and manage blojsom plugins, categories, uploaded images, etc. Fortunately, this is easy to turn on again (as Richard Caccavale pointed out here). I had to edit /Library/Tomcat/blojsom_root/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/zbeckman/flavor.properties and uncomment the line that reads:

admin=org/blojsom/plugin/admin/templates/admin.vm, text/html;charset=UTF-8

These two changes make a world of difference.

After looking into the customizations further, I decided not to update blojsom to 2.25. Apple has made enough changes — some of the most significant in their handling of templates — that any attempt at an upgrade would likely fail. If you want the latest blojsom features, I’d recommend downloading Tomcat and blojsom separately and running your own instance.

Personally, I think Apple’s user interface improvements and simplifications make blojsom better. It’s easier to use and more user friendly. You can still customize your templates, but if you want to install standard blojsom themes you’d have to do that outside of Apple’s theme switcher and change blojsom’s configuration files. Apple does the job by copying a new stylesheet. They use a single template file and change the look and feel by changes to the stylesheet only (which is actually a very nice way to do it).

Edit: Once you have uncommented the line (and restarted), you can access your admin interface by adding “?flavor=admin” to your weblog URI. For example, http://www.domain.com/weblog/zbeckman/?flavor=admin.