Meet Bramble
Until recently, this 'ere blog was run using the excellent Bryar software, which I maintained after its original author stopped supporting when he stopped being a programmer and went off to Save The Heathen. Bryar fitted by needs and worked well, but it had several features that I just never used, and others that were never fully implemented. I added a few features that I wanted, but it was getting harder and harder to hack on as my needs diverged more and more from Simon's.
So a few weeks ago, I wrote my own replacement from scratch. It's called Bramble, because areas of bramble bushes are sometimes called a briar patch. You probably didn't notice when I deployed it, because it supports all the old URLs so nothing broke*. And by leaving out support for stuff that I never used anyway, it's become easier to add shiny new features. For example, it was about 30 seconds work to make it support wildcards in IDs, so if you want to see all my book reviews you can click here. Naturally, these views of the data are also available in RSS.
* you may have wondered why it re-published everything one night in the RSS feeds - that's because the canonical URLs of all my posts changed. They now look REST-ish, like http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/id/remixing-insanity
instead of http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/index.pl?id=remixing-insanity
. The old URLs will still work though.