The Geekess

reCaptcha Comments work!

I now have reCaptcha comment verification working on this blog, which means comments are re-enabled. This is my first time dabbling with python, so the results are not polished. :) Details and patches below.

Folksonomy plugin fix

Jamey helped me debug a PyBlosxom plugin problem this morning. The Folksonomy plugin was throwing errors when it was asked to generate an RSS feed for a specific tag (e.g. http://sarah.thesharps.us/tags/pyblosxom/index.rss).

The lighttpd error log showed this:


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi", line 96, in ?
    p.run()
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py",
    line 203, in run
    blosxom_handler(self._request)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py",
    line 984, in blosxom_handler
    defaultfunc=blosxom_file_list_handler)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/tools.py",
    line 759, in run_callback
    output = func(input)
  File "/home/sarah/blog/plugins/folksonomy.py",
    line 482, in cb_filelist
    return getEntriesForTag( tag, args )
  File "/home/sarah/blog/plugins/folksonomy.py",
    line 492, in getEntriesForTag
    for entry_location in entrymap[tag]:
KeyError: 'open source/index'

The code that generates the string to search the tag entry list wasn't stripping off the "/index" part of the URL. The patch Jamey wrote is here. I should send in the patch to the author too...

Comments enabled

Comments are now enabled on my blog. I ran into some issues with configuring the pybloxsom comments plugin...

New Cherry Flavour!

I just switched my blog to a new cherry blossom flavor:

I took the blossom picture this morning. The picture is of the cherry tree by my parents' house. I have fond memories of climbing that tree. :) The picture editing and flavour file setup took about three hours total. Most of that time was spent in the Gimp. All the flavour files are available for download.

Pyblosxom TODO

Things I still need to install and test before I decide on Pyblosxom as my blogging platform:

comments and captchas
~~the readmore plugin~~ (because my entries are often long)

There's also a very long list of things I'd like to do if I decide on Pyblosxom:

Autumn flavor installed

Successfully got one flavor installed and tweaked. A flavor (or "flavour" if you're British) is a skin for your blog. There's a default flavor, but you can also change the flavor you see by passing some variable to the cgi script. I forget what it is.

Anyway, I think the autumn flavor is really awesome. I think the footer file is constraining the way the calendar and tag cloud look. I'll have to dink around with other flavors and see what they do differently. But it's really pretty! I took a screenshot, just in case I change the flavor later:

/me needs sleep.

Now with even more Git!

I'm currently setting up my remote git repository for my blog. I have to setup a post-update script, so that changes to the remote repo will be reflected in the local checkout of my blog (which is on the same server, coincidentally). It's a bit of a hack, but PyBlosxom needs the actual files around somewhere on the server.

Here's my post-update script (where $blog is the directory of your local repository):

#!/bin/sh

cd $blog
unset GIT_DIR
git-fetch origin
git-reset --hard origin/master

Pyblosxom folksonomy.py tags plugin not working

Still trying to get the tagging plugin to work. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. The plugin is in my plugin directory (renamed to tags-sorted.py instead of tags-sorted.txt). I've set the tags URL to--oops, there's the problem, I needed a trailing slash at the end of the URL. Let's reload and see if that's really the problem...

Nope. I needed to add $tags to my html flavor's story.flav file. I'm still not seeing any entries in the tags folders that I created; I'm not sure what's up with that. I should probably get a better html flavor before I attempt to add a tag cloud.

Edit: I fixed it! I didn't understand what tag_url was supposed to be. A lot of people have Apache mod_rewrite for their blog urls, and they assume that everyone else does too. For a beginning install, tag_url should be the URL for the pyblosxom cgi script, followed by /tags/. E.g. http://minilop.net/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/tags/

Oh, and you need to add two variables to your config.py or sometimes looking up a tag will fail:

py['ignore_tags'] = []
py['relatedstories_header'] = ""

What a mess! None of it is documented in the plugin file.

Now with more Git!

My blog entries are now under revision control with git. This is becoming most civilized.

This is my second post

This is my second post with PyBlosxom, and I'm using the markdown plugin. Here's some markdown formated stuff:

My proposed garden layout (which has since undergone a couple revisions):

Gaps in the Pyblosxom install instructions

I just installed Pyblosxom on Jamey's Debian server, and now I'm posting my installation notes on my new Pyblosxom blog!

Unfortunately, the Debian package for Pyblosxom has been orphaned. The package version is 1.3.2, and the current Pyblosxom version is 1.4.3. Someone submitted a bug report about the lack of updates, and included a link to a package they'd updated to 1.4.2. This was before the package was orphaned, so no one could sponsor an upload of the new package. I grabbed the 1.4.2 .deb file and installed it with dpkg -i. Works great so far.

There are two installation pages on the Pyblosxom website that I found relevant: the Debian install instructions, and the CGI install instructions.

The Debian instructions are very short, and it didn't mention that the Debian package installs flavours in /usr/share/python-support/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/flavours. I copied those files to my homedir so that I could modify the HTML flavor and change the look of my blog.

The CGI instructions didn't mention that flavourdir is a string, not a list of strings. So it can only be one directory, not multiple directories. If you wanted to keep the default Debian flavour directory, you would put this line in your /etc/pyblosxom/config.py:

py["flavourdir"] = "/usr/share/python-support/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/flavours"

My blog URL is currently at http://minilop.net/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi The installation instructions talk about using Apache mod_rewrite to change your blog URL to something more sane, but you really don't need Apache. Jamey's server runs LightTPD, and he's said you can do similar URL redirections with it.

Several times during the install, I had to check for Pyblosxom error messages in /var/log/lighttpd/error.log.

This is my first post

This is my first post with PyBlosxom. The date for this post is part of the filename, and the pyfilenamemtime plugin will make PyBlosxom use that date for displaying the entry, rather than the file timestamp.