PolkaDot 1.5 review

PolkaDot is a really simple blogging system, roughly based on Blurt, which in turn is based on Bloxsom. PolkaDot project is much sim

License: Freeware File size: 10K Developer: Tom Carlson

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PolkaDot is a really simple blogging system, roughly based on Blurt, which in turn is based on Bloxsom.

PolkaDot project is much simpler than either, both in terms of installation/configuration as well as its (minimal) feature set. It's also written in PHP, rather than Perl like its inspirations.

It's short for "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Blogkini." Or did you mean "Why write PolkaDot?" Actually, my friend Roger has a blog and I was giving him a hard time because he's using WordPress rather than writing his own blogging software. (I mean, really, what kind of a geek doesn't write his own blogging software.) I had seen Blurt on Freshmeat recently, and decided to whip up something similar in PHP. Took a couple hours, total. (Granted, I grabbed all the hard code from php.net comments.)

Here are some key features of "PolkaDot":
It's free.
It just needs PHP. That's all. No database. No external libraries. No Perl or ASP. Nothing fancy at all. It'll run on the cheapest of hosts.
There's no real installation.
There's very little configuration. And, even if you don't configure a thing, it'll still work.
It's simple as can be:
Posts are just text files.
Categories are just sub-directories.

Limitations:
Very few features.
No RSS feed. (Although I might add this.)
No comments. (Doubt I'll add this.)
Uses system time. I'm on the east coast. The host is on the west coast. So all the posts show a time 3 hours earlier than my local time. (I might fix this.)
No fancy stuff like calendars and opinion polls.
Probably doesn't scale real well. (But, if you wanted a large site, why would you even think of using this software?)
A whole lot of other things that aren't coming to me right at the moment.

Requirements:
PHP-enabled server or hosting service. (Darn near any of them will work these days.)
Some means of creating text files (Any old text editor, like vi or NotePad or even "copy con:". I use TextPad.)
Some means of copying the text files from requirement 2 to the server or hosting service in requirement 1. (FTP or whatever your host provides. I use TangoDropBox.)

Installation:

Put index.php, config.php, and style.css in a directory. It can be the root directory of the web site, or under a sub-directory. That's really all there is.

Configuration:

You don't have to do any. But if you insist, edit config.php and change these five variables to taste:
$blogname determines the name of your blog. This shows up in the title bar and at the top of the page.
$maxPosts determines the maximum number of posts to show. Setting it to -1 turns the limit off.
$convertHTML determines whether quotes, angle brackets, and ampersands get converted to the appropriate HTML entity codes. Turning it on (=1) means you can just stick those characters in your posts. But you won't be able to embed HTML in your posts. That means no hyperlinks and no images. Turning it off (=0) means you're responsible for using " instead of ". But you can embed HTML to your heart's content. Note that PolkaDot always converts line breaks to the appropriate HTML. So don't worry about that.
$skipDir tells PolkaDot to skip over certain directories. This is mainly if you put the files in the root of your web server and your host has other system directories there. "cgi-bin" would be a typical example. Change it to "$skipDir = array();" to disable.
$staticLinks defines the sites that show up in the list of "Other Sites" in the right-hand sidebar. Change it to "$staticLinks = array();" to disable. (Although it'll look funny if there are no sites listed.)
The site's appearance is all handled in the style-sheet. Change it if you like. It's not my design anyway.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds XHTML compliance, post ordering by either changed date or updated date, and the placement of all static strings into the configuration file for easy customization and language localization.
Documentation changes include a how-to on setting up PolkaDot Search in the FireFox/Mozilla search toolbar.