Blog woes

19 Dec 2007

Last night, I switched my blog to tumblr; this morning, I switched it back to Blogger. Over the last two days, I've spent a ridiculous amount of time and effort trying to make the switch without breaking any links. I'll spare the details, but it involved a lot of mod_rewrite, a PHP script written by Henrik Nyh that proxies all requests to tumblr, and a huge list of URLs mapping the old Blogger ones to the new tumblr ones.

I found the proxy-with-a-PHP-script thing distasteful, but the lack of decent tag support was the thing that ultimately made me give up. I have a Python-specific feed that gets aggregated by the unofficial planet python, so whatever I switch to needs to be able to generate tag-specific feeds. Tumblr does let you add tags to your posts, but it doesn't seem to actually do anything with them.

So, I'm in search of blogging software. I want something that:

Is written in Python or Ruby. Python because I know it very well; Ruby because I want to know it better.
Is simple. I'm not interested in anything built in Django or TurboGears or Rails. Preferably, it would be something that runs on my local machine, generating the static files that make up the live blog.
Allows custom URLs but has sane defaults. (I.e., no exposed serial integer keys.)
Supports tags and can generate subfeeds based on them, as well as human-readable post lists that are filtered by them. (For example, with my current blog you can look at only Python posts if you want to.)
Does not involve a database. (Not even SQLite.)
Reads the posts out of plain HTML files, which I will write by hand.

I've looked around for something like this, but everything seems to be either big (e.g., Pyblosxom and Typo) or someone's weekend project that never got touched again. I'm sure that the bigger ones are quite good at what they do, but I just want something that takes my plaintext files and generates an appropriate URL structure. It can do it offline or online I don't care but it's got to be simple and require no complicated installation or configuration.

So, any ideas, or am I starting a new project?