Setting up this blog
This blog runs on under BlazeBlogger, which I chose because it's quite simple to configure and use, supports the very limited range of operations that I need, and is available as a Debian package. I had previously installed it on the local-area network (MathLAN) that I administer at Grinnell with the command
/usr/bin/aptitude install blazeblogger
issued as root.
To set up the blog, as an ordinary user of MathLAN, I created two directories, one for the editable versions of the blog posts and BlazeBlogger's internal configuration files and one for the visible version of the blog that BlazeBlogger builds:
mkdir -p blogs/afp mkdir public_html/afp-blog
Then the command
blaze-init -b blogs/afp
populated the editing-and-configuration directory, and
blaze-config -b blogs/afp
enabled me to edit a number of configuration options,
blaze-add -t "Algorithms for functional programming: the premise" -b blogs/afp
enabled me to write up the initial post and save it to the editing-and-configuration directory, and
blaze-make -d public_html/afp-blogs -b blogs/afp
built the visible Web pages and published them.
Actually, there was a problem with the last of these commands. In blaze-config, I had changed the lang option from the default value of en_GB to en_US, which implicitly directs BlazeBlogger to find and use a file containing American English versions of several words and phrases that it uses in building the Web pages (the names of the months of the year, etc.). For some reason, the Debian package for BlazeBlogger does not include this file. However, I was able to find a copy of it at http://blaze.blackened.cz/files/lang/en_US. I placed a copy of this file at blogs/afp/.blaze/lang/en_US and re-ran the blaze-make command, and this time it succeeded.
I ran the command
chmod -R go+rX blogs/afp public_html/afp-blog
to make sure that all of BlazeBlogger's files were world-readable.