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<olb> American; 34; based in Boston, Massachusetts; developer: PyBlosxom; developer: Miro; employed: Participatory Culture Foundation; working on second children's book; mostly decent guy; busy. </olb>

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purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Wed, 18 Aug 2004

What to do with pyblosxom

David Ascher started using PyBlosxom and there are a couple of other users who look like they're just starting to use it as well. I think that's fantastic--especially given that the project is on life support right now.

Life support? What makes me say that? Well, I've been threatening to do a 1.0.1 release for months but never did it. Development has all but stopped because there aren't any active developers. Back when I released 1.0, I told people I wasn't going to touch it for 6 months because I was really burned out on this project and I had too many other things going on. So then nothing happened except a mild trickle on the mailing lists.

I'm not sure what to do. I can't really take on another project and push it through the motions. PyBlosxom has documentation, but it's mediocre and has large gaps and it's spread across two sites one of which I don't think most people get to. The debian maintainer for the PyBlosxom package needs help updating the package, but I don't know enough about packages to help and haven't had the time to work on it. There has been some interest in a flavour registry, but it seems that there's only interest from a "we want a flavour registry" perspective and very very little to no interest from a "I'd like to contribute to a flavour registry" perspective. Blah blah blah.

There are a bunch of issues and no one to solve them. I'm really hesitant to throw my energy at this project again. Part of me wonders if I should just start solving some of the smaller problems that need to get solved (lack of testing infrastructure, lack of centralized documentation, ...) and then go from ther step by step. Seems so overwhelming.

Not to mention that my life is a mess right now--I'm still moving and I've got a list of promises I haven't fulfilled dating back to two or three years ago. Then I got bitched out on one of the projects I work on for being an elitist egomaniac. I just want to help identify and fix problems to make things better/easier/faster/more useful! Is that so wrong? I'm just one man! Gah!

[ tags: dev, pyblosxom, python | category: /dev/pyblosxom | Permalink | 5 comments ]

Posted by Andy Todd on Wed Aug 18 18:21:41 2004
My suggestion is to list what needs to be done for the next release (be it 1.0.1 or 1.1), making sure it's in nice bites size chunks, and see who can do what.

Perhaps the wiki is the place to do this? A quick check tells me that there is already a page in place - http://wiki.subtlehints.net/moin/PyBlosxomToDo - Perhaps it just needs to be expanded with the non-coding tasks.

Posted by will on Fri Aug 20 00:05:16 2004
That's the place I had dumped everything I could think of that was "outstanding". Having said that, most of it is stuff I have no interest in coding and don't particularly think is really needed.

I'm working through the short list of stuff I want to get done--stuff that's easier to just do rather than explain to people what I'm thinking should be done.

But then I'd really like to get a group of developers together who are interested in working through some of the requests users tend to have. Things like flavours, plugins, ATOM support, better RSS support, how to install comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, ... Documentation issues abound as well.

Anyhow, I'll start sending more email to the pyblosxom-users list and inevitably that will result in making the todo list more comprehensive and specific.

Posted by christopher baus on Fri Aug 20 01:00:17 2004
Funny I was just browsing around for something more hackable than moveable type, and I found this. I hate perl so this seems more up my alley.

As a developer I'm looking for something that is more of a blog toolkit rather than an entire pre-canned app. I mean it would be great to just write my entries in emacs, and type, rebuild-blog at the command line. That might seem weird to non-dev types. I also like the fact that you use files for the repo. I'd like to hack in a subversion back end...

I'm going to give it a download tonight and have a look around.

Posted by Greg Wilson on Fri Aug 20 12:34:36 2004
Would you like to recruit more Pythoneers while moving pyBloxsom forward? Go to your local college or university, ask 'em if you can send a note to the student mailing list saying something like, "Would you like to learn how Open Source development is really done? And have something neat to put on your resume at a time when the job market is very tight? Come along to [room, time] and find out more about the PyBlosxom project." Once you have minions, you only have to spend a couple or three of hours a week answering questions and steering them back on track. And it's a lot of fun, and you get some valuable practice in project management... Everyone wins.

Greg

Posted by Brett Kelly on Mon Aug 23 08:47:30 2004
Even with what I consider a mediocre python skillset, I'd be willing to hack on pyblosxom when time permitted, especially if you were to supply the bite-sized chunks that Andy mentioned above :)

Coding in python is one of my all-time favorite activities, and I know I'm not alone. I have to believe there are plenty of others out there who have the same problem I do : all the motivation in the world, but zero creative inspiration. Harness that passion, man.

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pyblosxom::1.5 dev

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