Me and Pyblosxom

, 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 It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with.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.

I've been working on Pyblosxom since January 9th, 2003. The initial commit from Wari is on November 24th, 2002. I discovered that (according to the commits), I was the second person to commit to the codebase. I didn't know that.

In January of 2012, I started a hiatus from Pyblosxom. We had done a ton of overhaul work for 1.4 and 1.5 and I was tired and wanted to work on other things.

I've decided it's time to end my reign as maintainer of Pyblosxom. I sent an email to the pyblosxom-devel list as such. Further, I contended that maybe it's time for the project to end altogether.

Yes, I suggested maybe it's time to end the project. The reasons are two-fold:

  1. The code has a ton of technical debt. There are a lot of plugins that need a lot of help. There's a lot of squirrely code. I've done a poor job of fixing the "Where can I find plugins?" and "Where can I find pretty flavours?" problems. Those are big problems and potentially require a lot of maintenance.

  2. It's really hard to fix architectural problems with Pyblosxom without changing the scope of the project. I contend it's way easier at this point to just start a new one.

Anyhow, I'm a little sad and I'll have to figure out what to do with my blog, but I think it's been a long time coming and it feels good to put it to rest.

So, two things:

  1. If you're interested in maintaining Pyblosxom, hop on the pyblosxom-devel mailing list and say hi!

  2. I cut a lot of my teeth on this project. Most of the current problems are my fault. If you're a current user of Pyblosxom, thank you for using something I spent a ton of time on and cared very much about and thank you for your patience as I figured a lot of things out.

On to new horizons!

Updates:

April 7th, 2021: updated the Pyblosxom url

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