Casey asked me why I want to rewrite my blogging software, and why I don’t plan to use a CMS. Good question. The answer is that, in the face of current circumstances, it seems the “right” thing to do. Here are my current circumstances:
For the past few months though, I’ve had a hankering to create content that isn’t suited to a blog format—content such as thousand word essays, searchable notes on movies I’ve watched and a personal information manager.1
A CMS is probably exactly the right thing to solve this problem, but the size of CMS software frightens me. Zope looks about the same complexity as WebSphere Application Server—meaning about 40 hours of reading manuals, followed by six months hands-on before I knew all the nooks and crannies.
1 The first thing I’m going to do is get blogging working, of course. The second will be to get the Cardboard Checklists working again, and the third will be to write some documentation on the software, starting with collating all these “Blog Replacement” blog entries.
Comments
I think that you should use reStructuredText (from docutils) as the default composition format. It scales from short blog/wiki entries to entire books, requires little training, and is easy to use anywhere monospace fonts are available. I use PyDS as my blogging software for the sole reason that it has good reST support.
Blogs are mostly static, other than the comments, I wouldn't worry about "commercial web software" or "returning 410". Just write something that runs on your local machine, spits out the html files and uploads them to your server. Not only is this easier to develop, but it's more efficient because it eliminates useless load on your server. The comments thing can be a stupid CGI, it doesn't really need to scale.. you could even just host your comments on pycs.net or the like, which means even less work.
I'll be interested to see how you go using that 10 hours a week on the train. I have a 15 minute walk to work at the moment, so I don't have that opportunity, but I used to commute to uni and found that I needed that time sitting on the bus as down time to collect my thoughts and let my brain relax.
Also, I'm guessing that you're talking about 10 one hour trips a week, and I don't tend to work well in small windows like that. If I sit down and get 3 hours on a personal project then I'm productive, but 1 hour is enough time to ramp up and figure out where to head next, and not enough time to do anything meaningful.
Regardless, good luck with your plans, I can sincerely empathise with your desire to be productive with personal projects and push your boundaries. I hope it all goes as expected, and I look forward to reading about lessons learned along the way! :)
I'd second Bob's suggestions and raise you my HTMLTemplate module [/hubris] as a good way to template your ReSTed content.
Taking some well established concept/technology like CMS and seeing if you can't do it different/simpler/better is cool by my book. Nowt like a good shakeup to knock out any accumulated dust and dryness now and then.:) Will follow with interest.
Hamish: thanks for the pointer. Looks a little like woven, but simpler. I'll keep it in mind.
Here's the link:
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/htmltemplate.html
"I spend 10 hours a week sitting quietly on a train. I have a laptop. I should be doing something."
Yes, read books.
Assuming you don't get train-sick.
No new project should be developed in Woven. Woven was a very capable platform on which to build some very complex web apps I created. Unfortunately that complexity leaked through into the framework itself. Nevow (really just Woven 2.0) is much more conservative when it comes to implementation details, and attempts to do more with fewer framework constructs. Consequently it is easier to understand and use.
I see the need for some simple, lightweight, but extensible blog software in Python, also. In fact, writing a blog in Python was the reason I started writing Woven. If you choose to use Nevow as the templating mechanism I would be very interested in helping.
Anyone attempting Nevow development should join #twisted.web on irc.openprojects.net and ask questions freely. There are always lots of Nevow developers/users there who will be glad to answer your questions. Right now Nevow is in the process of moving out of the Quotient CVS repository and into it's own Nevow repository, and shedding some dependencies as it does so. Things should settle down in a few days and we are looking to do a release with some documentation before PyCon.
Good luck with this project!
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