Interestingly, as I am debating the merits of various blogging solutions, Robert Thomas “beau” Hayes Link posts to the Blosxom Yahoo! Group and basically asks what blosxom’s fate is. (Interestingly, I don’t know if he intentionally meant the pun by using “wither” instead of “whither.” Get it? Blosxom. Blossom. Wither. Whither. Anyway.)

In my mind (correct me if I’m wrong), blosxom seems to be the prototype for the filesystem-based blog engine. (Whereas solutions such as Wordpress, Moveable Type, and Typo embody the relational-database-based blog engine.) And basically, the idea that is Blosxom has been ported to Java (as blosjom, which incidentally comes built-in with newer versions of Mac OS X), to Python (as PyBlosxom), and to Ruby (as Sakura, Lily (both of which have documentation in Japanese which, unfortunately, I don’t understand), and Blosxonomy (also unfortunately right now, I can’t get the blosxonomy site to load, although it is also featured on the Ruby Application Archive and on Pete Freitag’s blog.)

I guess Ruby really is the “next new best thing.” In my search for more filesystem-based blog systems, I stumbled upon Flare (strangely, it seems that blogs running Flare¹ are using Kubrick-like themes, looking a lot like the default style of Wordpress 2.0) While Flare is yet another complex blogging system built on a relational database, what is interesting is that you can use a quasi-filesystem-like database like KirbyBase. Text files here we come. Of course, I’m not sure if it addresses my other wants, but we’ll see if we can’t shoehorn this onto my Dreamhost account and play with it a little bit.