Sun 09/03/25 : A New Blogging platform?
I've recently (yesterday, Saturday 8th March) set up a blogging platform on my Virtual Private Server.
I came across
- A dokuwiki https://wiki.millerjs.org/start
- A separate blog by the same person https://millerjs.org/
I was struck that he had both a blog and a wiki .
I've thought of doing the same, rather than using dokuwiki as the method of writing blog posts. I've always avoided it, as I think something like wordpress would be too large and cumbersome to install and to learn, for my miniscule blogging efforts.
After some searching I worked out that the blog was running on chyrp-lite https://chyrplite.net/ and that it appeared to be straightforward to install on a server that already had working Apache and PHP. It can be configured to use a simple sqlite3 database file if you don't want to install and configure a full-blown MySQL database server.
Installation
I downloaded the current version from github https://github.com/xenocrat/chyrp-lite/releases/tag/v2025.01.01 using wget on my VPS
wget https://github.com/xenocrat/chyrp-lite/archive/refs/tags/v2025.01.01.tar.gz
I un-tarred it, and then copied the whole directory to the webserver document root…
Then began a few minor problems….
- I had to enable
PDOin the PHP.ini file - I had to install
php-sqlite3 - I had to install
php-mbstring - I had to
chownvarious directories in thechyrpdirectorychown -R www-data:www-data chyrp-lite - I had to make a separate directory
chyrp-lite-datain/var/www(i.e. outside the webserver document root which is/var/www/html/) to hold the sqlite database andchown -R www-data:www-data chyrp-lite-datatoo. - Then the
install.phpprocess eventually completed correctly and I have a workingchyrp-liteblog
My Chyrp-Lite blog
https://gm4slv.org.uk/chyrp-lite/
After adding a few posts, I think that, yes, it's a nice simple but usable blogging platform. It does enough for my needs.
But… it's a different markup language to the one used in DokuWiki - and I've become very comfortable here that I might not want to have to learn a different markup just for blogging. This split between wiki and blog also spreads content and information between 2 different places - is it better to keep it all in one place?
So…
I've decided to stick to dokuwiki and its Blog Plugin for blogging - I don't do much, and many things I might want to write about would end up here in dokuwiki anyway.
I'll leave the chyrp-lite installation for a while but it might disappear at any time.
UPDATE 15/03/25
I've deleted the chyrp-lite blog installation after making a copy and storing it in case I want to resurrect it.
