I thought it would be fun to compile a list of blogging tools that not many people might be aware of. Mind you, most of them are for the hardcore geek-types and all of them are not your run-of-the-mill PHP/MySQL driven CMS type blogging solutions. Most of them publish static, fully self-contained websites, but in a blog format. I think a few of them are also dead projects, not having been updated in years.

But it is interesting to check out. Here are a few I found out (mainly using Debian's package manager).

Blosxom - This is described as a lightweight, yet feature rich blogging tool. Mind you, it's written in Perl, so I guess not many present day bloggers would be comfortable dabbling with CGI scripts and such.

hobix - This one is odd. That's all I can say about that. Check out the website and prepare to be stunned.

chronicle - This one is described as a tool that will convert a directory of text files into a blog with an RSS feed. Appropriately called a blog compiler.

nanoblogger - This is a blog tool that you use entirely from the UNIX command line. It relies on no database, no GUI, nothing except a few simple UNIX command line tools to generate a complete blog-like static website. It does support plugins which sounds interesting.

tDiary - This one seems to be another online diary generator powered by Ruby. The original site is in Japanese, so I'm linking to the Debian package page.

I've not tried or tested any of these tools, except nanoblogger (very perfunctorily). But I always enjoy discovering such hobbyist software projects that never make it to the mainstream.