Posts tagged Pyblosxom

I've just spent the whole night setting up blog comments. PyBlosxom doesn't make it painless, sadly, more like the opposite. First: don't be scared by the list of comment-related plugins on the PyBlosxom site. There's only one important plugin: comments. All others depend on it and enhance its functionality. The last three or four times I was about to add comments to my blog I got scared at step one: evaluate the available plugins.

Wanted: PyBlosxom plugin to bake CSS styles into the RSS feed, i.e. replace things like <span style="keyword"> in the main blog pages with things like <span style="color: #ff7700"> in the RSS. Also wanted: a spam-resistant comments plugin. (Maybe some/all of them are? I was always afraid to try.) And a tags plugin (categories are too limiting). And useful page titles. And a pony. Update: Laurence Rowe and Alexander Artemenko suggested I check out cssutils.

I want to store my blog in Subversion. Problem: Subversion does not preserve mtimes of files. Solution: a plugin like pyfilenamemtime, but different (I do not want to rename existing blog entries). Since I want to import my existing blog entries without renaming them, I wrote a plugin that reads timestamps from a separate text file. This should suffice, in addition to adding [miscellany] ### Set use-commit-times to make checkout/update/switch/revert ### put last-committed timestamps on every file touched.

I've just discovered that Pyblosxom's default (i.e. builtin) RSS template does not include dates nor IDs. I'm disappointed. This kind of breaks the whole "usable out of the box" feeling. Google to the rescue: after a brief look at Blosxom and RSS and Daniel's pyblosxom RSS templates I've borrowed Daniel's story.rss with a different timezone substituted. Doesn't pyblosxom have a variable that would expand into the server's time zone? What about daylight savings time -- do I have to edit story.