Extra Cheese

A Blog

My blog woes have been soothed

Dec 22, 2007

It seems I've mostly solved my "blog woes". I got some quite helpful replies (still visible on Blogger, although the comments didn't come over to my new blog). I also got emails from Will Guaraldi about PyBlosxom, and from Lloyd Dalton about blog_my.

I took at least a brief look at each system mentioned in the comments and emails, but I decided on PyBlosxom. If you're reading this in a web browser, what you're seeing is PyBlosxom rendering a theme I ported from Tumblr, with all of my old Blogger blog's content imported. Quite frankensteinian indeed, as far as blogs go.

It turns out that my impression of PyBlosxom's size when I wrote my "blog woes" post was a bit off - I didn't realize just how little functionality resides in the core. It's pretty slim, but with a decent selection of plugins. I only needed tags, wbgarchives, and metadate, but there are plenty more for those who want more features. With the tag and metadate plugins, I managed to keep my blog posts in almost exactly the format I've always used, so that was nice.

PyBlosxom nicely solves my biggest concern, which I didn't explicitly state in my original post: I want to keep all of the files related to my blog in a Mercurial repository. I've succeeded in that - my entire blog is in Mercurial now. That includes configuration files, the .htaccess file, the template, the entries, and even the queue of unfinished entries. If I ever need to, I should be able to move the blog to another host in a matter of minutes. Not that I ever intend to leave WebFaction (note: that's an affiliate link), which is where it's happily hosted now.

With that all out of the way, hopefully I can quit the detestable practice of metablogging, which I'd managed to avoid for my entire first year. Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion, and special thanks to the PyBlosxom developers.

Showing 7 comments

Posted by Bill Mill at Sat Dec 22 22:39:23 2007

Good choice! Did you write/publish your mercurial plugin, or did one already exist?

Posted by Titus Brown at Sun Dec 23 00:29:46 2007

I use darcs to manage my blog content ;)

Posted by Gary Bernhardt at Sun Dec 23 10:46:32 2007

Bill, I must've been unclear - I'm not using a mercurial plugin; I just keep all of the relevant files in Mercurial. The mercurial repository lives at ~/myblog, with ~/myblog/entries, ~/myblog/flavours, etc. inside it. It also has a ~/myblog/misc directory, which contains configuration files that the PyBlosxom installation itself symlinks to.

It's really a wonderful thing to have it set up like this. When I wanted to add comment support, I just cloned the repository and did it there. Once it was all working, I "hg push"ed back to the main blog repository and everything worked.

Posted by Joonas Pihlajamaa at Tue Jan 15 14:54:58 2008

The idea of having version control on a running blog is actually quite cool. So you are using the actual blog as a master, and doing development using checkouts?

Does it work without problems on WebFaction? I would assume you create a dummy application and then replace the content of that webapp with the checkout of your blog?

Btw. what kinds of control files does Mercurial use? If it doesn't use a database, I assume you need some protection for those in web server, or else they would be world-readable?

Posted by Gary Bernhardt at Sat Jan 19 15:07:27 2008

Joonas,

I do treat the main blog installation that you see at blog.extracheese.org as the master for practical purposes, although Mercurial obviously doesn't enforce that since it's distributed.

I do have a sort of "dummy" application set up on WebFaction, and I point that at a cloned repository. Together those form my "test" blog, which I use to test formatting, HTML validity, etc. before deploying. There's also a cloned repository on my local machine. Generally, new posts start on my local machine, then get pushed to the test blog once their content is complete, and then get pushed to the live blog once I've verified that they look right when deployed.

The mercurial repositories live outside of the HTTP root, and I symlink to the parts that need to be world-visible. So nothing is exposed unless it should be.

Posted by Marius Gedminas at Wed Apr 1 12:12:09 2009

Which plugin do you use for comments, and how well does it handle spam?

I'd like to add comments to my PyBlosxom blog, but I don't want to spend all my nonexistent spare time moderating the comment queue.

Posted by Gary Bernhardt at Wed Jun 24 12:51:56 2009

I use the "comments" and "akismetcomments" plugins. I've only seen a couple spam comments make it through in a year and a half, although it has also rejected some legitimate comments. There's no queue; comments get posted immediately. I've manually deleted the few spam comments that made it through.