Dec
22
My blog woes have been soothed
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.
Dec
19
Blog woes
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?