Extra Cheese

At Northwest Python Day 2010 on January 30th, I gave two talks; this is the second, which was the last talk of the day. I tuned it to its audience and time slot, making it biased toward an audience that already knows Python, as well as being lighter than originally intended. I still quite like the result.

During my talk, I mention Ruby.rewrite(Ruby), a talk by Reg Braithwithe. I recommend it. It also happens to contain my favorite quote from any talk, ever, which I will not repeat here. You'll just have to guess!

I've removed a few small bits from the audio – one grossly incorrect statement, one slide that could be misinterpreted in ways I want to avoid, and a couple of audience questions that I basically had no answer for. None of these edits affects the content of the talk in my opinion.

The talk is dense and necessarily glosses over a lot of subtleties. I talk about the Zen of Python, monkey patching (several times), the Ruby community's reckless hastiness, the syntax of RSpec and cucumber, beauty and ugliness in languages and testing tools, the complexity of the languages' grammars, syntactic vs. semantic complexity, the relative taste of grasshoppers and tree bark, etc., etc. There's way too much here to give anything a fair treatment. I hope that you'll keep this in mind while watching, avoid interpreting the talk as a claim to absolute truth, and simply enjoy it for what it is.

Shortly after the event, Geoffrey Grosenbach posted his thoughts. You should take a look for another viewpoint.

I'll be at PyCon later this week, by the way, so feel free to commiserate with, or rant at, me. With that, here's the talk:

Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to The Death from Gary Bernhardt on Vimeo.

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?