(Note: ii has been supplanted by a successor, jj which uses Markdown instead of the custom ii markup.)
Infernal Icecube (aka ii) is a weblogging content management system. That is, it's a program that helps you manage your blog (or blogs). It's intended for people who are familiar with USENET and a Unix command line.
Infernal Icecube supports templates. They're nice and simple and it's pretty straightforward to get something from oswd.org to work with it.
It also supports some basic RSS syndication.
There's a markup language for creating your content. It's modeled after the ASCII conventions used in email and USENET news. This makes it similar to markdown but slightly better, at least in my opinion.
You can also use ii as simple filter to convert markup to html.
It has relatively few dependencies. (See below for a list).
It maintains a version history on all of your articles and allows you to revert back to any previous version.
It lets you use a real text editor.
There are no special server-side requirements. The blog itself is completely static. This means that you can use ii with even the most limited hosting provider.
All content stays on your computer. That means you can switch hosting providers with impunity.
ii stores your content in well-known file formats, so you can fix it if something goes wrong.
With a couple of exceptions, all ii commands are completely non-interactive and scriptable.
ii is reasonably well-documented, if I do say so myself.
It's Free and Open-Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Generating HTML is somewhat slow.
It requires a relatively recent version of Perl. (Well, one from the last couple of years^Wdecades, anyway.)
No comments or trackbacks.
You can't post to your blog remotely through a web browser. (But you could always set up a mailfilter rule to import certain messages into ii and then use webmail. Or you could just use ssh.
Here's a weblog made with ii. (Update: not any more.)
Here's the manual in handy html form.
Here's a screenshot^Wsample session:
$ ii beta config
$ ii beta preview
Error: Missing template file.
$ ii beta template white
$ ii beta preview
$ opera: Activated running instance
$ ii beta add
Entry stored with ID 1
$ ii beta publish 1
$ ii beta preview --no-browser
$ ii beta edit 1
$ ii beta preview --no-browser
$ ii beta edit 1
$ ii beta upload
Uploading files...
Done.
To run ii on your computer, you will need:
Perl 5.8.x (or later). (You might be able to get away with using Perl 5.6.x and the Net::FTP CPAN module, but I haven't tested this.)
A reasonably Unix-like environment. I use Fedora Core Linux (versions 2 and 5) but I've also tested ii under Windows(!) running Cygwin.
rcs, tar and make. Any relatively recent version should be fine. (I used to say "any version from the last decade" but apparently, rcs hasn't been updated since 1995.)
make is only needed for installing so in a pinch, you could just run the commands by hand and get by without it.
You can download the latest version here.