How To: Setup a blog with limited access (GO BLOSXOM!)

Mood: Monday Blues

Scene1: Monday morning at work. I need to get feedback about a product from users and domain experts. This feedback will determine (to an extent) the direction in which my project moves. So w/ a cup of hot coffee, I try to get my brain to wake up and think of how I can accomplish the task at hand. I know what I want; something that is far-reaching, simple yet secure. The coffee works and a couple of solutions come to mind. I try to analyze them but each solution seems to have some or the other drawback. Here are some of the options that I toyed around with -

1. Meet-up in person…..sounds like a good idea to have the company buy me lunch! Nah, but this is not a far-reaching solution. I might end-up meeting only a handful of people. So DELETE it.
2. Creating a web-page with the desired UI. (You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out….) Great! But who is going to do it and how much time will it take and all the resource issues and yess dealing w/ the red-tape. DITCH.
3. Create a new wiki-page and ship the link. People can edit the page and post their feedback, comments. Umm….simple for me but maybe not so simple my target audience. BACKUP PLAN.
4. Blog….Coolest and neatest. All I need to worry about is the IP and security issues and these ARE the major issues. WAY TO GO iff I can control and limit the access to this blog and also have control over where the content is saved.

And so I begin my quest for such a blog provider! After about an hour of googling I stumble upon this post .

Mood: Excited

Scene2: Eureka! I see a ray of hope in Blosxom and eagerly plunge into its documentation. After some reading, I am 50% convinced that this might work and decide to give it a shot. I plan to try my hand at it for about a day, see what results I get and then make a decision.

Mood: Jubilant. Professional decorum prevented me from doing a victory dance.

Scene3: Proudly showing off my piece of work to colleagues, etc; receive appreciative comments, questions, “I-am-impressed-but-don’t-want-to-sing-praises” expressions, etc. Getting this blog up and running was a fun learning experience. Learnt some, refreshed some about Perl, CGI scripts, IIS and HTML.

Mood: Anticipating

Scene3: The next step before I actually use this for its intended purpose is of course to get the BOSS’S approval; me waiting for the same.

HOW I DID IT

1. Installed the “for everyone” version of Blosxom (V2.0) to run on my windows box.
2. Downloaded and installed the MSI for Windows of ActivePerl.
3. Installed IIS on my Windows box. (OS -Windows XP Professional). I host(IIS) my blog locally, so, all the content, including comments are saved on my machine.
   
4. Enabled the comments and comments count feature for my blog using the pollxn plugin and pollxn’s plugin for Blosxom. With this, I can have my audience provide me feedback.
   
5. I am using anonymous authentication method (default).
6. Customized the look and feel of my blog using simple templates from the blosxom site.

SEE, I TOLD YOU SO

1. Follow instructions. They help.
2. Knowing perl helps, but you will do fine if you don’t.
3. Was a wee bit disappointed when I read the “Blosxom for windows – Coming soon”, after spending some time reading the documentation and getting all excited. Don’t worry. The “everyone” version works fine w/ windows.
4. Windows XP Pro. does not have IIS installed by default. I had assumed it was. I was surprised that my machine did not have the Inetpub and wwwroot folders and went ahead and created them. Very soon I realized the mystery behind their absence; these folders are created during IIS installation.
5. I had hoped to use the login plugin to have user authentication for my blog. But decided to skip that since my machine would be accessible only within my company domain and that was what I wanted.