Strong Bad Comics

I usually don’t find Strong Bad comics that humorous but “unused emails” is rather amusing. If you have not seen any of the Strong Bad comics it might be worth checking out if you find yourself bored and listless.

Well now… Isn’t this all a tad ‘trendy’?

I got bored yesterday night (what a surprise) and decided to check out what was new in the world of GNOME software. A great little GNOME news site (http://www.gnomedesktop.org) mentioned two little tools with great potential: gnome-blog and BloGTK.

So after reading about these tools I was reminded how tedious it was to update this page and how I really needed some way of automating it if my lazy self was ever to use it. I had spent quite a bit of time in the past playing around with various Content Management Systems and Blog application but found I disliked them all. They were either way too bulky, too complex, or written in some ass language I wanted nothing to do with.

With this in mind I was quite pleased to stumble upon pyblosxom. The name is hard to spell and the documentation is hard to read (I need to write a ‘I fucking hate wikis’ rant one of these days) and almost nonexistent. Normally this would turn me away from such a package but the fact it was written in Python (mmm… python) encouraged me to give it a spin.

After spending a few hours playing around with it, reading the docs, and reading the source I actually saw what I liked. Basically pyblosxom is a simple little hack of a blog management system. Blog entries are stored in plain text files with a brain dead simple format, the template system is very easy, and it is relatively easy to hack in whatever you need. Add in the XMLRPC interface with Blogger XMLRPC API support so your average RSS aggregator or Blog browsing application can upload and manage new posts, and the deal is done.

I did have some difficulty trying to use gnome-blog and BloGTK with the xmlrpc interface unfortunately. The problem with gnome-blog involves a bug with gnome-blog and the program simply barfs when trying to do simple things. I’m guessing the problem is my python environment is newer then the developers due to my current use of Fedora with daily rawhide updates. I’m afraid that I’m not that good of a python hacker yet to understand the nitty gritty of Python’s XMLRPC library to help debug the problem.

BloGTK seems to work fine except I had to hack pyblosxom’s blogger API to work around quirks in both BloGTK and pyblosxom. All told the hacking consisted of editing 5 lines of code in the blogger API plugin. Not Bad. All it takes for me to make a post is to launch the BloGTK program, click connect, type in the post, spellcheck, and click “Post Entry”. Editing existing posts and deleting posts can all be done very easily in BloGTK. All the magic happens over the XMLRPC interface (which is just a CGI script on my website) and BloGTK even remembers the username and password. This is a lot easier then my “open vim, edit the html file, use my rsync over ssh script to push the update” trick.

So what does this mean for you, the chosen few among the masses gifted enough to read this site?! A permalink for each individual posts and an RSS feed with a cute little orange XML logo (if you are trendy enough to use News and RSS aggregators). What… You think I spent 8 hours over the last two nights learning new technology for your benefit?!?

Now I just need to find a decent RSS aggregator for GNOME/Gtk2 that doesn’t suck or have a long dependency list that is unrealistic to maintain.