2004.06.01
Adding Perl Modules to Blosxom
Last night I thought I was going to goto bed but before going I wanted to work on a long standing irritation with my Blosxom setup.
I’m using the ScriptAlias method outlined here. The trouble was that Blosxom would not render pages other than .txt files from the data directory. For example, image files would not show up on the page. I worked around this by creating an entirely seperate URL at archive.ookee.com and putting my image files, the CSS file and other things at that location. This irritated me,though, because it was so cumbersome and… wrong.
I knew there were some plugins like binary and static_file to work around this but I could never get them to work. I would get internal server errors. I figured -accurately- this was because I was missing certain Perl modules the plugins call for (like File::Cat) but even after downloading and installing them I would get errors. Last night I finally decided to go through the error logs and find all of the Perl modules I was missing. There were a lot, many of them not specified in the plugin but necessary for the Perl modules. One important thing I learned is you put the Cat.pm module in a directory called File to create File::Cat.
I spent a very long time hunting and downloading modules from CPAN. I put them in the directory I set up with the uselib directory and would try reloading the site and with each error I would check the httpd error_log. Finally the site loaded without error! I tested an image within my data directory and it loaded. Finally I can run my site out of a single directory, at least once I migrate all my hundreds of other files back. Yeehaw for static_file.
As a side benefit some of the other plugins now work, such as wishlist which you can see in action in the sidebar on the front page. Yes, I am a consumer whore. It might not stay there too long…
Categorized: geek
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