Will's blog

I overhauled the PyBlosxom web-site so that it's now being statically "compiled" using PyBlosxom's static renderer. The whole thing is checked into SVN, too. That's a huge improvement from the previous situation, but the web-site could use user-interface and navigational work.

In doing that, I did a lot of futzing with static rendering using the code in trunk and fixed some issues. I also thought through the filelist implementation and re-worked it so that it handles sorting and truncating better. The results are really nice and I think it fixes all the major problems previous versions had.

GHOP was a big help. PyBlosxom had several tasks that were worked on and the results speak for themselves:

• Testing plugins #1 - testing comments, comment-openid, nospam or spamquestion: completed by klossalex
• Testing plugins #2 - testing pyguest, weblog-add, tags: completed by CanadaBear
• Testing plugins #3 - testing filter, latest, autoping: darkmessenger88
• Testing plugins #4 - testing pycategories, pygallery, contact: completed by CanadaBear
• Memory footprint - investigate memory footprint of PyBlosxom: completed by josiahw
• Writing plugin #1 - write a new entry cache plugin using pickle for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #2 - write a new entry cache plugin using shelve for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #3 - write a new rst formatter plugin for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by cracka80

It was a huge help that these people did for PyBlosxom. I haven't fully absorbed their work yet, but it should happen before PyBlosxom 2.0 is released. Many thanks to those of you who helped out and many many thanks to Google and the GHOP, PSF, Titus, Doug, Georg, Leslie and all the others who helped make this possible. Thank you!

There are a few big things that still need to be done for PyBlosxom 2.0. I'm moving through it slowly and methodically. I was hoping to have it done by the end of December, but I'm thinking now it's going to be the end of March or thereabouts.

I released PyBlosxom 1.4.3 with better support for WSGI and Paste and support for template variables of the form $(foo). More information on the PyBlosxom web-site.

I'm hanging out on #pyblosxom on irc.freenode.net more often now that I'm hanging out on irc.freenode.net for work during the day. Zeth was on today and pointed out that if you're running PyBlosxom with Paste, then the default configuration doesn't allow for css and image files to be served.

This weekend, I wrote a media serving plugin for PyBlosxom which solves this issue, but I decided to spend some time to write a WSGI application to do the same thing and use Paste's urlmap to handle the routing. It took 10 minutes to throw together and it works nicely. I'll clean it up and throw it in the Trac instance tomorrow. Over time, I'm liking WSGI more and more.

I mentored Z who was working on pyblosxom-webfront which is a web-based interface to your PyBlosxom blog.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the project. I had a pretty crazy May and June that definitely affected the first half of the project, but Z and I had a few chats just before the second half and ironed most of the issues out.

While he was working on webfront, I rolled out PyBlosxom 1.4 (and 1.4.1 and 1.4.2) which have support for Paste. Paste makes writing plugins and testing them _so_ much easier. Z also worked out some problems with making complex plugins. We should look into refactoring the comments plugin accordingly.

From here Z says he'd like to continue working on webfront and maintaining it. There are a bunch of things that it's missing, but it's a good platform to build on and it was a good experience to work with him to get there.

Thank you Google!

It's been 17 months or so since the last PyBlosxom release which for a small project is probably too long a period of time. Real life is a harsh mistress sometimes.

Changes:

• bunch of bug-fixes
• converted the documentation from docbook to restructured text
• updates to the documentation
• code overhaul
• added the beginnings of unit/functional testing using nose
• better WSGI support
• Paste support

w00t!

I quietly released an RC2 for PyBlosxom 1.4 today after merging in Yury's patch for Paste support and merging in Steven's work for WSGI support. It's really awesome to be able to do paster serve blog.ini and have things work. At a minimum, it'll be a lot easier to test PyBlosxom--no mucking about with web-server configurations needed anymore.

We've finished moving all the documentation from docbook to reST format. It still needs a lot of work, but we're making measurable progress which is really cool. Also, the documentation is easier to work with and maybe that reduces the amount of energy it takes for people to help out.

PyBlosxom 1.4 should be released soon. Very soon. Will it be perfect? No, but it's a huge milestone for the project. That's pretty exciting in the grand scheme of things.

06/24/2007 - Fixed "server" to "serve". I keep typing paster server ... which is wrong.

Blake poked me via email and suggested I put together some ideas for a PyBlosxom GSoC project under the PSF umbrella a couple of months ago. It was a hectic time, but I threw some ideas together based on items we had in the TODO list (many of which are pretty stale at this point). I'm happy to say that we had a great proposal for building a web front end for PyBlosxom--a tool that I think a good portion of PyBlosxom users would be happy to have.

I'll be mentoring this project over the course of the summer. Z has already started working on things and I think this will turn out nicely.

As a side note, this is a huge motivator towards finishing up a release and getting out a new version of the PyBlosxom manual. On the flip side, I'm getting married in a week so I'm finding it difficult to allocate time to get the work done. Wedding planning is intense. They should use wedding planning to teach project management courses--talk about shifting requirements and general project insanity. ;)

Someone posted my article Cleaning Up PyBlosxom Using Cheesecake onto programming.reddit which was a bit of a surprise to me.

I'll keep track of the entry and the comments that it generates in case there's any feedback that would be useful for making the article better.

I saw Titus' Strangling your code and growing your test harness: ... entry and that's the process we've been using for adding a test system to PyBlosxom. We're still on step 2 or 3, though. We have unit tests for a portion of the tools module in and working but that's it. We need a setup/teardown code for testing a request on a basic blog for n variations of "basic blog". Getting there....

My semester break is drawing short and I didn't get much of what I wanted to get done done. I merged Lance's documentation fixes in, I'm fiddling with a new pyblcmd script, and I'm cleaning up things I started, but never finished.

Ryan is going hog-wild with getting the comments plugin to a better place.

I was thinking of switching the web-site to use MediaWiki and in doing so solve a bunch of issues we have, but I think I'm going to wait on that for a while. In the meantime, I do plan on doing a web-site update and make it look more like some other Python-project web-sites. In the process of doing that, I think I may move it over to be statically rendered.

That's it for this status report--trying to keep it short and sweet while getting across that some things are happening, but it's slow going.

Many thanks to Lance and Ryan and all the other folks who have been putting time and energy into PyBlosxom over the last few months. You guys rock!