←07 : Blog

I've recently (yesterday, Saturday 8th March) set up a blogging platform on my Virtual Private Server.

I came across

1. A dokuwiki https://wiki.millerjs.org/start
2. 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.

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 PDO in the PHP.ini file
• I had to install php-sqlite3
• I had to install php-mbstring
• I had to chown various directories in the chyrp directory chown -R www-data:www-data chyrp-lite
• I had to make a separate directory chyrp-lite-data in /var/www (i.e. outside the webserver document root which is /var/www/html/) to hold the sqlite database and chown -R www-data:www-data chyrp-lite-data too.
• Then the install.php process eventually completed correctly and I have a working 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.