Will's blog

I'm in the process of passing off maintenance to a few people who expressed interest on the pyblosxom-devel mailing list. Towards that goal, I've moved pyblosxom to a new github repository under the pyblosxom organization. Thus it's now at:

https://github.com/pyblosxom/pyblosxom

I then forked it, so you can continue looking at my fork if you so desire, but I probably won't be doing anything with it going forward.

I've been working on Pyblosxom since January 9th, 2003. The initial commit from Wari is on November 24th, 2002. I discovered that (according to the commits), I was the second person to commit to the codebase. I didn't know that.

In January of 2012, I started a hiatus from Pyblosxom. We had done a ton of overhaul work for 1.4 and 1.5 and I was tired and wanted to work on other things.

I've decided it's time to end my reign as maintainer of Pyblosxom. I sent an email to the pyblosxom-devel list as such. Further, I contended that maybe it's time for the project to end altogether.

Yes, I suggested maybe it's time to end the project. The reasons are two-fold:

1. The code has a ton of technical debt. There are a lot of plugins that need a lot of help. There's a lot of squirrely code. I've done a poor job of fixing the "Where can I find plugins?" and "Where can I find pretty flavours?" problems. Those are big problems and potentially require a lot of maintenance.
2. It's really hard to fix architectural problems with Pyblosxom without changing the scope of the project. I contend it's way easier at this point to just start a new one.

Anyhow, I'm a little sad and I'll have to figure out what to do with my blog, but I think it's been a long time coming and it feels good to put it to rest.

So, two things:

1. If you're interested in maintaining Pyblosxom, hop on the pyblosxom-devel mailing list and say hi!
2. I cut a lot of my teeth on this project. Most of the current problems are my fault. If you're a current user of Pyblosxom, thank you for using something I spent a ton of time on and cared very much about and thank you for your patience as I figured a lot of things out.

On to new horizons!

While I was writing up the release blog post, I figured out that I've probably been working on Pyblosxom 1.5 on and off for the last three years or so. That's pretty intense---I knew I'd been working on it for a while, but I didn't realize how long it actually was.

The last year or so of development has been fun. There's a pretty consistent contingent of friendly folks who hang out on #pyblosxom. I really appreciate their humoring me with my period, "Pyblosxom 1.5 is almost done! I just have to ..." announcements.

Details of the release are in the release blog post. If you've been waiting to upgrade, this is a good version to upgrade to.

Going forward, I'm going to take a hiatus from Pyblosxom development. I've got a bunch of other projects that I've been ignoring for a while that really need some attention. I'll continue to review patches, help out on #pyblosxom and the mailing lists, and I'll push out future releases, but I won't be doing any major development for a while.

PyBlosxom 1.5 rc1 was released a month or so ago. Since then I haven't had much time to finish things up.

Spaetz kindly did the work to move PyBlosxom source code from svn on SourceForge to git on Gitorious. The plan is to move development to Gitorious and the web-site, documentation, bug-tracking, and things like that to a site on my server bluesock.org.

This enables people to fork PyBlosxom trivially and make the changes they need to make to get PyBlosxom working for them. This will result in more experimentation and work being done and reduce the problem of me and my decision making being a bottle neck in future PyBlosxom development.

The other big change that's happening partially in the PyBlosxom 1.5 timeframe and partially in future versions is the ecology for plugins. Previously, I ignored them and spent my time on PyBlosxom core stuff. Ryan was maintaining the plugins, but the infrastructure we had for plugin maintenance sucked. Going forward, plugins will fall into two categories:

• Maintained plugins will be in the plugins/ directory of the pyblosxom tarball. These plugins will have unit tests and will be versioned alongside PyBlosxom.
• Plugins maintained by other people will be indexed on the website in a registry, but one that will suck less than the current plugin registry.

The plugins that are currently in the contributed plugins pack will be split into those two groups.

PyBlosxom 1.5 is waiting on some more documentation changes, some more plugins work, and now some project infrastructure changes. I'll probably do another release candidate soon and suggest people start using that.

If you're interested in helping out, come hang out on IRC on freenode.net in the #pyblosxom channel. The conversations have been interesting over the last couple of months and have been instrumental in work getting done.

I finished up some additional work and I'm at a testing stage for PyBlosxom. I want to do some more testing and some documentation then it'll be ready for testing releases.

Also, I spent a couple of minutes upgrading my blog to use 1.5 in trunk. Bumped into bunch of weird issues with the comments plugin, but otherwise it was really smooth.

It's been a long time since the last status. PyBlosxom 2.0 had been stagnating for a year and I decided to move it out of the way, put it out of its misery, and start new progress with the PyBlosxom 1.4.3 tag. I scaled back the vision and now I'm working on PyBlosxom 1.5.

I've pulled in some of the changes that were destined for 2.0 and added some new ones:

• lots of code cleanup
• pyblosxom-cmd script that automates a whole bunch of things and gives plugins command-line abilities
• re-working the documentation using Sphinx
• doubling the number of unit tests
• fixing a lot of bugs

In the very near future, I plan to overhaul the website and fix project infrastructure issues.

That's where things are. Hoping to have an April release of PyBlosxom 1.5.

I overhauled the PyBlosxom web-site so that it's now being statically "compiled" using PyBlosxom's static renderer. The whole thing is checked into SVN, too. That's a huge improvement from the previous situation, but the web-site could use user-interface and navigational work.

In doing that, I did a lot of futzing with static rendering using the code in trunk and fixed some issues. I also thought through the filelist implementation and re-worked it so that it handles sorting and truncating better. The results are really nice and I think it fixes all the major problems previous versions had.

GHOP was a big help. PyBlosxom had several tasks that were worked on and the results speak for themselves:

• Testing plugins #1 - testing comments, comment-openid, nospam or spamquestion: completed by klossalex
• Testing plugins #2 - testing pyguest, weblog-add, tags: completed by CanadaBear
• Testing plugins #3 - testing filter, latest, autoping: darkmessenger88
• Testing plugins #4 - testing pycategories, pygallery, contact: completed by CanadaBear
• Memory footprint - investigate memory footprint of PyBlosxom: completed by josiahw
• Writing plugin #1 - write a new entry cache plugin using pickle for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #2 - write a new entry cache plugin using shelve for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #3 - write a new rst formatter plugin for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by cracka80

It was a huge help that these people did for PyBlosxom. I haven't fully absorbed their work yet, but it should happen before PyBlosxom 2.0 is released. Many thanks to those of you who helped out and many many thanks to Google and the GHOP, PSF, Titus, Doug, Georg, Leslie and all the others who helped make this possible. Thank you!

There are a few big things that still need to be done for PyBlosxom 2.0. I'm moving through it slowly and methodically. I was hoping to have it done by the end of December, but I'm thinking now it's going to be the end of March or thereabouts.

I released PyBlosxom 1.4.3 with better support for WSGI and Paste and support for template variables of the form $(foo). More information on the PyBlosxom web-site.

I'm hanging out on #pyblosxom on irc.freenode.net more often now that I'm hanging out on irc.freenode.net for work during the day. Zeth was on today and pointed out that if you're running PyBlosxom with Paste, then the default configuration doesn't allow for css and image files to be served.

This weekend, I wrote a media serving plugin for PyBlosxom which solves this issue, but I decided to spend some time to write a WSGI application to do the same thing and use Paste's urlmap to handle the routing. It took 10 minutes to throw together and it works nicely. I'll clean it up and throw it in the Trac instance tomorrow. Over time, I'm liking WSGI more and more.

I mentored Z who was working on pyblosxom-webfront which is a web-based interface to your PyBlosxom blog.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the project. I had a pretty crazy May and June that definitely affected the first half of the project, but Z and I had a few chats just before the second half and ironed most of the issues out.

While he was working on webfront, I rolled out PyBlosxom 1.4 (and 1.4.1 and 1.4.2) which have support for Paste. Paste makes writing plugins and testing them _so_ much easier. Z also worked out some problems with making complex plugins. We should look into refactoring the comments plugin accordingly.

From here Z says he'd like to continue working on webfront and maintaining it. There are a bunch of things that it's missing, but it's a good platform to build on and it was a good experience to work with him to get there.

Thank you Google!