Archive for February, 2003

ByLine is a MoveableType-ish weblogging system, written in Python, open sourced.

Satine is a Python library that converts XML documents into Python objects for easy reading and editing.

I cannot believe the amount of cool Python code people are writing these days!  Meanwhile, my head is filling with ideas for Hep much faster than I can implement them in code.  Outside of work, I haven’t had a lot of time for coding these past few weeks, which is frustrating.  But I’m plodding along, doing a little here and there, trying to be patient.

In unrelated news, I’ve updated my page about running Linux on the Compaq Evo N610c laptop.  A lot of people have been coming to this site looking for that information; now they’ll find a more complete and accurate page.

Python Desktop Server is a free Radio replacement (written, obviously, in Python).  Create and manage a weblog, read RSS feeds, publish weblog entries and articles to a server, all through a browser-based interface (although the web server runs on your local machine, so the interface should be snappier than most browser apps). Apparently you can also write your own extension scripts too.

Zoe, if you haven’t heard, is a desktop email client with a web interface.  There’s a new release out that lets you get messages from RSS feeds as well as POP and IMAP mailboxes.  The new release of Zoe also lets you edit the contents of your mailboxes via the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. 

I’m not a fan of web-based interfaces, so I don’t use Zoe as my mail client.  But the developers are doing some really interesting work, and this new version looks like a big step in the right direction.

It’s been just over seven months since I first announced Hep.  In picking the name "Hep" I applied the tiny bit of knowlege I had about naming projects, specifically that you should pick a name that’s interesting and short (so people can remember it), but not too common (so search engines can find it).  I wasn’t sure about the "not too common" bit (it turns out that Hep not only is a word meaning "knowledgeable about the latest trends or developments", but an acronym for High Energy Physics).  But it seems to have been a good choice – my site is now on the first page of results in a Google search for "Hep".

Emmanuel Frecon:

There is just no difference between e-mail, news (in the sense news groups) and news feeds. So, why would not regular e-mail programs integrate RDF news feeds in the three-paned window, pretty much the same way that they have integrated news groups? All these are just messages.

I found Emmanuel’s site via my referrer log – he linked to Hep a few days after the post quoted above.  Emmanuel also appears to have a mail-to-blog script that lets him attach images to an e-mail and have them show up in the blog entry.  Cool.  I’m subscribed to his RSS feed.

I’ve created a new module in Hep CVS called "messaging".  This is the code for the new messaging library that I’ve been working on, the library that will be in Hep 0.4.  You can also use this library for your own applications, although at the moment that wouldn’t be a good idea since it’s buggy and the API is still changing.  It uses the Twisted framework.

If you’re interested in playing with the code, you can get it by following the instructions on the Hep CVS page at SourceForge.

J. Murali wrote an article about Hep for The Hindu, a newspaper from India.  It’s a nice, clear explanation of what Hep is, and how to set it up.  I would have been suprised to see Hep mentioned in any non-techie publication; to see it in a newspaper from halfway around the world is pretty amazing!

I’ve put together another release of Hep, version 0.3.3.  You can download it via my Hep page.

I was hoping to not do another release until 0.4 was ready, but over the past month I’ve accumulated a few important bug fixes and wanted to to get them out to people.  See the updated changelog for details.

Les Orchard is thinking about moving from Moveable type to Pyblosxom.  "I’ll just have to work out some way to redirect requests for ‘old’ URLs to the new content", he says.  Which reminds me that a while ago I made some changes to my own 404 handler, and forgot to mention it here.

The improved 404 handler reads a tab-delimited file called moved.txt.  The file has two columns – old file location, new file location.  Requests for the old file will be redirected to the new one.  The cool thing is that both old and new file can be regular expressions, so if you change the format of your archive pages from /archives/year_mo.html to /archives/year/mo/, you can just add a line to moved.txt like this:

/archives/(….)_(..)\.html    /archives/\1/\2

The code is here: http://www.fettig.net/files/404-2.py.

I’ve returned from vacation.  E-mails will now be anwered.

This site is now running the latest PyBlosxom, v 0.6.  Also it has a new design, just because I had the day off yesterday and felt like playing with CSS.  Visually it’s not a radical change, but stucturally it’s an improvement. The new design uses CSS for markup purposes only – take away the CSS and you still have a perfectly good page.  It looks good in lynx, it looks good in Mozilla, it looks good in most versions of IE, the exception being IE 5.0 for Windows, which leaves a big gap in the menu bar when it first renders the page.  It leaves the gap there until you mouse over one of the menu links, at which point the gap goes away.  I’m not using javascript, just CSS… anybody know of a fix?