North Knight Software

After deciding that we would need a news section at some time in the future, I started looking for an open source content management system. I wanted something simple and straightforward, and was hoping something which used plain-text files instead of a database. Eventually settled on Blosxom (pronounced: blossom), a text-based journaling system built in Perl.

After playing around with Blosxom for a bit, I was mostly happy, but there were some issues. I started to modify the package, but a strong dislike for Perl overwhelmed me, and I soon found myself starting from scratch on a Blosxom-like written in PHP. Once I had the meat of my new version written, and liked where things were heading, I decided to name it Osxome (pronounced: awesome). The name shouldn't be taken too seriously.

I've finished the first version, and it's up for grabs. I'm fairly happy with the way it turned out, and I'll certainly be using it for personal projects and small things around the office. I'll also be making more releases going forward to make it more friendly and useful. I don't think I'll be adding too many more features to it, however. There are precious few pieces of bloat-free journaling/blogging software around.

One thing I've hyped up a little bit is the secureness of the application. It's not actually that big a deal usually, but when on a shared hosting server, a database is a difficult thing to keep properly secure. If you don't need or want robust content management features, plain-text is actually a pretty nice option.

Anyway, feel free to check the thing out.