Overriding Blosxom's Time Stamping

Blosxom, the Perl blog engine powering this site, is amazingly flexible due to its plugin architecture. But one aspect of its behavior is not customizable through a plugin: it determines an article’s date by the time of the last modification (mtime) of the file containing it.

I wanted the ability to date files to arbitrary points in time, since I sometimes write up things I did or saw long after the fact. Also, I didn’t like that editing a published article pushes it to the front again.

Instead, I wanted Blosxom to take an article’s date from its file name. I follow a consistent naming scheme where each article is in a file named year-month-day_title. After parsing the date at the beginning, we can use DateTime to construct a fake mtime based on the result. If the parsing fails, we fall back to Blosxom’s standard routine. Here’s the patch.

--- blosxom.cgi.orig    2011-03-20 10:33:29.002204071 +0100
+++ blosxom.cgi.mtime   2011-03-20 10:41:30.718204071 +0100
@@ -404,8 +404,35 @@
                 )
             {

+                # thomas11: save the regex matched groups in variables
+                # to preserve them from future regex matches and for
+                # readability.
+                my $path = $1;
+                my $file_basename = $2;
+
+                # thomas11: Use the date in the file name, as in
+                # 2011-03-13_title, rather than the actual file mtime. I
+                # sometimes publish articles long after writing the
+                # initial version.
+                my $mtime;
+                if ($File::Find::name =~ /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})_.+/) {
+                    my ($year, $month, $day) = ($1, $2, $3);
+                    use DateTime;
+                    my $dt = DateTime->new(
+                        year       => $year,
+                        month      => $month,
+                        day        => $day,
+                        hour       => 0,
+                        minute     => 0,
+                        second     => 0,
+                        nanosecond => 0,
+                        time_zone  => 'Europe/Zurich',
+                      );
+                    $mtime = $dt->epoch();
+                } else {
                 # read modification time
-                my $mtime = stat($File::Find::name)->mtime or return;
+                    $mtime = stat($File::Find::name)->mtime or return;
+                }

                 # to show or not to show future entries
                 return unless ( $show_future_entries or $mtime < time );
@@ -415,15 +442,15 @@

                 # static rendering bits
                 my $static_file
-                    = "$static_dir/$1/index." . $static_flavours[0];
+                    = "$static_dir/$path/index." . $static_flavours[0];
                 if (   param('-all')
                     or !-f $static_file
                     or stat($static_file)->mtime < $mtime )
                 {
-                    $indexes{$1} = 1;
+                    $indexes{$path} = 1;
                     $d = join( '/', ( nice_date($mtime) )[ 5, 2, 3 ] );
                     $indexes{$d} = $d;
-                    $indexes{ ( $1 ? "$1/" : '' ) . "$2.$file_extension" } = 1
+                    $indexes{ ( $path ? "$path/" : '' ) . "$file_basename.$file_extension" } = 1
                         if $static_entries;
                 }
             }