Dev (old posts, page 7)

Static rendering soon....

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I hacked for 3 or 4 hours on static rendering today. Almost have it complete where "complete" is defined as "statically renders your basic blog into html and other flavour forms" and is not defined as "handles dynamic content, comments, and other neat things seamlessly".

I think that'll all be in version 2.

In the process of implementing what I implemented, I moved some stuff around, cleaned up the common_start stuff, re-tested xmlrpc, removed some old files in the CVS repository, and fixed some bugs that had been lying around undiscovered.

Assuming I get some time tomorrow to work on it, I'll have static rendering finished before the end of the weekend.

testing xmlrpc

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I just made a bunch of changes to PyBlosxom and figured I'd test to make sure xmlrpc still works...

Lyntin status

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The mailing list has been really active. There is definitely a BIG correlation between mailing list activity and my motivation towards fixing things. Some of the things Eugene has said have irked me, but in general he's providing a lot of solid observations which (I think) have led to some really great changes.

In the last few weeks, we've:

  • fixed a couple of bugs
  • optimized out the get_engine() silliness
  • wheedled down the managers (there's still some more to do)
  • optimized the get_current_session() routine
  • optimized the filter_mapper case of hook spamming
  • made some really awesome changes to the python_cmd that make it far more usable

All good stuff none of which would have happened with a quiet mailing list.

pystaticfile v.1.5 released

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I added the Request object to the locals for eval_python_block. I also did away with the "printout" kluge I had--you can use print now.

If you used an old version and are upgrading to this version, you'll need to convert all your "printout" function calls to regular print statements.

Find it in my plugin index.

MCCP module 0.5 released

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Conan had sent me MCCP handling code back in August or September. It took a while to design the filter hooks that needed to go into Lyntin 4.0 to accomodate network-level data fixing (encryption, compression, ...). After I had added those filter hooks, I never quite got enough time to sit down and finish up the MCCP module...

Until now.

Find the first draft of the Lyntin MCCP module here with the rest of my Lyntin modules and rejoice that I finally got this off my todo list! w00t!

Dusting off Lyntin

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After a hiatus, I made some changes to the Lyntin website after looking at the groovy web-site which I discovered after reading Ted's blog.

It's interesting how I can work on something for tens of iterations honing it here and tweaking it there. Then I'll see something that's very similar to what I'm doing and suddenly everything clicks and *voila* I realize what big changes need to be made for a dramatic improvement.

Anyhow, there's a bunch of stuff in CVS for Lyntin that should get summed up into a release. I may tackle Telnet LINEMODE handling (which really needs to get done) and also the MCCP plugin. Eugene has a really slick curses ui which I think has reached a point where it should get included in the main distribution.

Things are afoot once more!

verify_installation for pyblosxom

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A couple of weeks ago, I checked in code to help out PyBlosxom installation and configuration. I made changes to pyblosxom.cgi so that you could run it from the prompt:

   ./pyblosxom.cgi

It tells you your Python version, OS name, and then proceeds to verify your config properties (did you specify a valid datadir? does it exist?...) and then initializes all your plugins and executes verify_installation(request) on every plugin you have installed that has the function.

As a plugin developer, you should add a verify_installation function to your plugin module. Something like this (taken from pycategories):

   def verify_installation(request):
       config = request.getConfiguration()

       if not config.has_key("category_flavour"):
           print "missing optional config property 'category_flavour' which allows "
           print "you to specify the flavour for the category link.  refer to "
           print "pycategory plugin documentation for more details."
       return 1

Basically this gives you (the plugin developer) the opportunity to walk the user through configuring your highly complex, quantum-charged, turbo plugin in small baby steps without having to hunt for where their logs might be.

So check the things you need to check, print out error messages (informative ones), and then return a 1 if the plugin is configured correctly or a 0 if it's not configured correctly.

This is not a substitute for reading the installation instructions. But it should be a really easy way to catch a lot of potential problems without involving the web server's error logs and debugging information being sent to a web-browser and things of that nature.

registry v.1.3 released

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I decided the registry plugin needed to allow users to see all the pending submissions and details therein. So I made some changes:

  • added handling of /registry_queue which shows all the pending submissions.
  • added some code to displaying of the entry so that the "edit" link doesn't appear if there's already a pending change.

Get it on my pyblosxom page.

PyBlosxom 0.9 coming soon.... (revised)

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We're almost done with 0.9 and the code is baking in CVS and Ted is doing all kinds of crazy stuff with metaweblog, comments, and his Lucene search plugins. When that all gets sorted out, then we'll do a release which has been a long time coming.

In the meantime, if you want to try out what's in CVS, here is a snapshot as of February 24, 2004. Setup is just like PyBlosxom 0.8.1. Features for users are pretty much the same. Biggest changes are architectural which will enable plugins to solve a very wide variety of problems and do all kinds of exciting stuff.

Official announcements and all that on the PyBlosxom site soon. Additionally, I've been working on Planet PyBlosxom, which will provide a centralized newsfeed of PyBlosxom stuff from PyBlosxom users' web-sites via their RSS feeds.