I'm almost done the next version of the PyBlosxom manual. At the suggestion of Steven, I converted the manual thus far from html to docbook. I still need to do a lot of work in terms of indexing and adding warnings and notes and various other indicators like that. I'm busy re-writing chapters to reflect issues people are having on the pyblosxom-users list.
I think I've worked between 20 and 30 hours on it over the last week and a half--it's almost like another part time job.
Back in 1998, I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266mhz monstrocity of a laptop which weighs in at over 8 lbs. It's really heavy. It's seen its fair share of action since then: it was toted back and forth between MA and CT while I was doing consulting work; it was abused by an x-girlfriend; it was shipped in a flimsy letter-sized envelope thing via USPS; and then it's been through several moves since I move on average once every 8 months. It's been through a lot.
The case is cracked, the things that latch the lid shut are broken, and
the power adapter has been fixed a few times (the last one by Brian who
had the right tools to fix it and thus it's been fine since [Thanks,
Brian!]). Even so, I powered it up last night, did an
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade and it's going fine. Slow,
but fine.
So this post is in homage to a laptop I bought back in 1998 that's stuck with me through thin and thick and is still usable even after all these years.
Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266 mhz circa 1998 laptop, I salute you.
We're going to try to push out PyBlosxom 1.2 in the next week or two. Steven did a lot of work fixing up static rendering and also fixing the architecture pieces that caused PyBlosxom to kind of suck when used in various frameworks like WSGI, Twisted and mod_python. I'm also going to do another round of documentation content.
We're going to push fixing the file handling to the next version. We want to allow for index caching and also reduce the number of times PyBlosxom walks your blogdir for entries. Both of these new abilities will significantly reduce the time it takes for large blogs to render. Getting there....
The plan is to have these changes in before Ted's talk at PyCon.
Got the notice from Network Solutions today stating that unless I renew right this second, the domain name is free again for anyone's taking.
I had worked with George to get Planet PyBlosxom up and running, but he seems to have paged out and hasn't responded to the last few emails I've sent.
It was an interesting thing to run for a year.
I need an external HDD enclosure so that I can [fill in obvious use cases here]. I have a couple of 3.5" drives that I'm not using, so that eliminates a 2.5" enclosure that can power off USB which is a bit of a shame.
Anyhow, I was looking at these:
Sabrent 5.25" USB 2.0 Aluminum External Hard Drive Enclosure
Kingwin Silver 3.5" USB 2.0 Aluminum External Hard Drive Enclosure
PPA 3.5" USB 2.0/Firewire External Hard Drive Enclosure with Light Bar
I haven't heard anything about any of these companies, though. So that makes it a bit difficult to decide which one to get.
Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone have a HDD enclosure they prefer over these?
In lieu of other solutions, I'm going to start releasing contributed plugins plugin packs. This one should work with PyBlosxom 1.1.
If you find problems with contributed plugins, visit this page on how to contact us "Problems" could be bugs, feature-requests, or setup issues.
If this works out, then I'll continue releasing contributed plugin packs that match up to PyBlosxom.
Find the contributed plugin pack at contrib.1.1.tar.gz.
Updates:
02/23/2005: Changed the url. Decided to do an actual "release" and store it on the PyBlosxom site.
Steven's been doing development on PyBlosxom to allow for other frameworks than plain CGI. The architecture changes he's making solves some other issues as well. The problem we've bumped into is that one of the things he wants to do requires us to change the minimum Python version from 2.1 to 2.2.
Details here.
Bill noted that it's likely that PyBlosxom won't work in 2.1 as it is now anyhow. I'm not sure--I don't have Python 2.1 anymore.
So the question is would it be ok to change the minimum requirements. Some folks who cannot change the version of Python they have will have issues with this (obviously), but is it a good idea anyhow? Is the world at a place where it's common to require at least Python 2.2 a for projects?
A while back, I adjusted the comments plugin locally so that it would allow me to have plugins that change the template type they use from "story" to other things. A couple of months ago, I sent Ted an email with which pieces go in which templates. Figured I'd stick that here in case someone is looking for it.
This is only for the "story" section. The head template goes before and the foot template goes after this example. This also only works with the latest version of the comments plugin that has the template stomping code removed.
<div class="news"> <- story.html <h2>$title</h2> | <div class="content"> | ... | </div> | links | </div> <- <div class="comments"> <- comment-story.html <div class="comment"> <- comment.html Posted by $blah at $blah | $blah | </div> <- <div class="comment"> <- comment.html Posted by $blah at $blah | $blah | </div> <- <div class="commentform"> <- comment-form.html form stuff here. | </div> | </div> <-
I'm in the Boston area and it's snowing pretty hard out. They're saying all kinds of things like we should all just go back to bed for a few days and sleep through it.
I'm proposing a less defeatist idea. I vote we should all switch to the New England diet! Snow for breakfast, lunch and dinner! If we all band together we can pull through this, lose a few pounds, and clear our streets! Because freedom shouldn't be allowed to get snowed in!
But the New England Diet isn't going to stop there, no sir! I'm going to write a book and start a company to produce New England Diet meals and we'll ship them around the world and I'll make a million dollars.
I finally got around to releasing PyBlosxom 1.1. The big change is that I'm only planning to work on and maintain the core--I'm hoping someone will come along and pick up maintenance for all the contributed plugins. I haven't figured out what the contingency plan will be. I might maintain that too, but whine about it very loudly until someone gets tired of me whining. I'm also slowly getting through working on the documentation. I noticed that the wiki that I'm basing a portion of my documentation on disappears every now and then. So... I'm thinking that's a good sign that I should finish up quickly.
George called me up and offered to take Planet PyBlosxom off my hands. I want to pass off all the little things to other people in the PyBlosxom community so that:
I have more time to focus on PyBlosxom core
Other people are involved in the community--more people -> more ideas -> better community
Minimize the significance of me in the PyBlosxom world
In the meantime, I'm working on finishing reading Dive into Python. It's one of those books I wished I had read years ago. I got a hard-copy from my parents for Christmas. I've put a halt on coding until I'm done.
Updates:
January 11, 2016 Updated the dive into python link.