pyblosxom manual, pyblosxom 1.2.1, and contrib 1.2.2

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

The last couple of weeks have been really chaotic. S went off to New Jersey for the weekend, so I've had a few days to work through the things in the bottomless queue of things to do. I've been making a lot of progress, but the queue is still daunting.

There were a few bugs found in the contributed plugins pack 1.2.1, so I'm going through, fixing the ones mentioned on the mailing lists and fixing some additional issues as well. I think I'll be done with the things by Monday.

In tracking down problems with conditionalhttp, I found a bug in the PyBlosxom blosxom renderer. I think it only affects conditionalhttp, but it does so in a way that makes conditionalhttp totally useless. If conditionalhttp looks at the If-Modified stuff and decides that the content has not been modified, it issues an HTTP 304... but then the renderer goes and renders all the content and sends it down the stream just as it would with an HTTP 200. Needless to say, this doesn't do much to curb bandwidth usage.

I'm hoping to fix the problem where we fetch and filestat all the blog entries multiple times in a given PyBlosxom request. It won't be the amazingly elegant fix I was hoping to do a couple of months ago--but that requires a whole lot more work and rewriting a bunch of things in a non-backwards-compatible way and thus disrupting plugins and such.

That brings me to the PyBlosxom manual work I'm doing. The manual is already 46 pages long (that include the GDFL text). I haven't covered developer topics yet--mostly I've spent my time writing and re-writing content dealing with installation, setup, configuration, flavours, plugins, static rendering, and writing entries. I'm still getting my feet wet with docbook, so that's causing it to take longer.

Manuals take a stupendous amount of time to write.

Incidentally, if you've even looked at the manual, let me know. I have no way of knowing whether I'm doing a lot of work for nothing. I'm also very interested with problems people have, portions that are vague, and any other comments. Additionally, if you want to help out, let me know.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.