Adventures in blogging

I've been using PyBlosxom for the last few years for my online presence here, and while it certainly does the job, I have a habit of getting bored with stuff that works after a while. So, I'm in the process of whipping up my own blog using Django, because hey, web frameworks are the new red. Or something.

Actually, real reason is that PyBlosxom is category-centric; there's no real inherent understanding of a post having multiple categories (perhaps tagging/multi-category functionality is there in a newer version, but upgrading has always been difficult because of a few changes I've made). I found most posts I made ended up touching on multiple categories; racing and geek stuff often overlap, for example. So, lacking native tagging of articles, and not wanting to mess with some of the tag add-ons I've seen for PyBlosxom, I figured I'd just write my own.

What's interesting about this move is that the most recent framework I have experience with is Rails, so it's been interesting to see a Pythonista spin on the idea. What's funny is that, from a functionality perspective, they're really quite similar. Scaffolding, database interaction, view and administration generation are all disquietingly similar. Except, you know, that Ruby vs. Python thing.

As expected, the basic blog application was a snap. I've been spending most of my time on "fit and finish"; putting together template tags for displaying the sidebar calendar, working out a quickie scheme for importing all the old data, and adapting my current "static" content to the flatpages contrib framework. I'm also trying to make sure I don't break the old URLs too badly.

Once I have most of what PyBlosxom does for me today implemented, I'll probably just cut over at that point. Afterward, I'll concentrate more on some of the specialty stuff I'd like to pull in: timeslips, logs from the cars, dive logs, etc. Fun stuff. And at some point, I'll throw the whole project into SVN so others can poke at it. (I might have to post up my calendar template tag on Django Snippets at the very least, since the only other one up there uses datetime instead of the new calendar module.)

Syndicated 2008-02-29 11:53:00 from esm