Pictures
So, I wanted to be able to post pictures. Seemed like a simple enough idea but I ran into a lot of problems. I tried 3 different plugins:
autoimg replaces simple tags in the story with html img tags. It was the easiest of the 3 to use, but didn’t do a good job on the layout. On short stories, images would interfere with the next story. Also, autoimg wanted images to come out of my website’s directory, not the directory where I keep blosxom stories. While this might normally be a Good Thing (separation of content and presentation), in my case the pictures are the content.
binary intercepts URLs passed to blosxom and checks to see if the file exists. If it does, it gets served up. Otherwise, blosxom.cgi gets to deal with the URL normally. This lets me store my images in the blosxom story folder, right next to my text files. It had several bugs, however, and I gave up on it.
static_file is a rewrite of binary. It works much better for me. Combined with interpolate_conditional, it is very close to what I wanted.
Here is an example. In my story, I have this:
<a href="poppies.png"> <img src="poppies.thumb.png" alt=[poppies]"/> </a>
The .png images are sitting in the same directory as the .txt file for this story. interpolate_conditional generates the proper URLs, and static_file catches the requests and serves up the right images:
I would like an easier way to add images than entering raw html source, but for now I am happy. Oh, and in case you are wondering I modified interpolate_conditional so it would pass those $’s through when it sees two in a row. Here is the patch
Update: I also made a patch for static file to make the default MIME type configurable.