I have been post­ing this blog us­ing PyDS for over 4 years now. Sad­ly, the PyDS au­thor seems to have aban­doned it. Which is sad, be­cause it's nifty soft­ware.

How­ev­er, keep­ing it work­ing is get­ting hard­er ev­ery year, and I don't ex­pect to be able to do it soon.

Al­so, the da­ta is in a Metak­it database, which is the most an­noy­ing DB ev­er (no re­al schema! colum­nar in­stead of record ori­ent­ed! gouge my eyes with a bread­stick­!)

So, since I have all the data, and my blog­ging needs are mod­est, and no tool does ex­act­ly what I wan­t, I de­cid­ed to write my own.

I could make it a web ap­p, maybe us­ing Tur­bo­Gears, but what the heck, I haven't done a de­cent GUI app in ... ok, ar­guably, I nev­er have done a de­cent one, and my PyQt4 needs some work, and I am kin­da in a groove for ac­tu­al­ly fin­ish­ing things late­ly (I am rather proud of RaSPF).

And I have a neat name (Bartle­Blog) re­served from an­oth­er abort­ed ap­p.

So, here's the manda­to­ry screen­shot af­ter a cou­ple hours hack­ing:

And here are the goal­s:

• Gen­er­ate stat­ic pages, so it can be used by any­one with a lit­­tle web space (I am a gip­sy)

• Sim­­ple tem­­plat­ing (Us­ing cher­ry­tem­­plate right now, but should be mod­­u­lar)

• Re­struc­­tured Text as in­­put mech­a­nism (a­­gain, mod­­u­lar)

• Good sup­­port for code snip­pets

• Should sup­­port stat­ic pages (like the ones I have in the Sto­ries link)

• In­­te­­grate with Flickr for im­ages

• In­­te­­grate "chunks" in the tem­­plat­ing, where you can do things like set­t­ing the right Haloscan com­­men­t/­­track­­back links eas­i­­ly

• Sim­­ple cat­e­­go­ry mech­a­nis­m, with a reg­ex­p-based au­­to­­tag­ger with­­out cre­at­ing per-­­cat­e­­go­ry copies of ev­ery­thing.

• RSS feed gen­er­a­­tion, glob­al and per-­­cat­e­­go­ry.

• A way to im­­port all my PyDS blog (and maybe my old­er ad­vo­ga­­to things)

• Use sqlite and SQLOb­­ject for sane stor­age.

So far, it's do­ing some things, I can im­port, ed­it, save (by in­stant ap­pli­ca­tion, there is no "save" here).

I can't yet gen­er­ate the site, or cre­ate a new post, and it should take months to make it use­ful, but let's see how it goes.

Back in oc­to­ber of 1996, when ev­ery­one was sav­ing for the fly­ing car we would buy in 5 years, and KDE was start­ing, slow­ly, to take shape in the minds of a few.... there was a gen­er­ous of­fer­...

Matthias Ettrich (ettr...@ti-ibm03.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) wrote:*
>         -------------------------------------------
>         New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)
>         -------------------------------------------
>
>                     Programmers wanted!

Freedom Software would be willing to contribute with
the source code of Freedom Desktop Light for this effort.
Please don't subestimate the task of building a
desktop manager. Several Years have been spent building
Freedom Desktop.  We could also contribute with
other pieces of technology (i.e Freedom Rt - Object oriented
toolkit). For more information about Freedom Desktop,
please visit http://www.fsw.com

Freedom Software is about to announce a free version
of the software for Linux (personal use only). This version
is called Freedom Desktop Light for Linux.

If I were you, I wouldn't restrict the project to a specific
toolkit (at least for now). There are many pieces of public
software that can be reused easily. It could take a long
time to rebuild everything from scratch. Try to reuse
the more you can now. You can standarize on a single
toolkit later.

Also keep in mind that Motif  is the defacto standard.
Most Unix platform ship with Motif. It would be nice
if your desktop work on all the versions of Unix

Edgar Galvis
Freedom Software
http://www.fsw.com/motif.html - Home of Freedom Desktop for Motif
supp...@freedom.lm.com

UP­DATE: I had not both­ered check­ing, but free­dom desk­top's site has been avail­able un­til very re­cent­ly. There is still some­thing in the in­ter­net archive, too.

I wrote in my first post about the world cup this:

We have a prob­a­ble su­per­star, but he's too young and a lit­tle in­jured. We have a ter­ri­ble goalie, an ag­ing de­fense, a lot of above av­er­age for­ward­s... I say semis, or quar­ter­s. If we get any fur­ther, it will be in the Italy way, not the Mex­i­co way.

When I said the Italy way, I meant as Ar­genti­na ad­vanced in Italy 90: with lots of suf­fer­ing.

Now, this was not even close to the equiv­a­lent match in Italy: re­lent­less­ly be­ing dom­i­nat­ed by Brazil, but boy was it painful.

Not a great match, but I have hope that's just beause we match up bad­ly with Mex­i­co.

Ger­many beat the tar out of Swe­den, and Eng­land has just fin­ished beat­ing Ecuador.

• Ger­­many is good, but I still want to know what hap­pens when they play a team that can ac­­tu­al­­ly score. The clos­est they had was Ecuador, but they played with­­out their best for­ward.

• Swe­­den... what a de­­press­ing team.

• En­g­­land... Like Swe­­den, but with a guy that can do free kick­­s.

• Ecuador... ner­vous. But not a bad game, they could have won if they had de­­cid­ed to bring it to En­g­­land, which should have had some play­er thrown out for re­­peat­ed foul­ing.

• Mex­i­­co... gut­s. Lots of them. Peo­­ple have said Lavolpe is crazy. His name means "the fox". So, yeah, he is crazy... like a fox! He made a per­­fect tac­ti­­cal set­t­ing, but was un­lucky with in­­juries.

• Ar­­gen­ti­­na... we can get bet­ter. I feel there is still an­oth­er gear. But we need it on fri­­day.

And to all my ger­man friends in KDE... good luck, and a pain­less 1-0 de­feat to you! ( just kid­ding ;-)

BTW: this is what hap­pens when Ar­genti­na plays (game start­ed at 16 hours):

... if I want to store a pass­word in kde­wal­let, from a non-kde ap­p, how can I do it?

It would be bet­ter if there was a client API I could link to that did­n't in­volve kdelib­s, or at least a DCOP in­ter­face.

This is nice tech­nol­o­gy, I want to use it.

I have been con­tact­ed by a few peo­ple about Qt/I­UP. Here's my cur­rent state of mind...

• It works most­­ly.

• It lacks a few wid­gets

• It needs some­one to walk over the docs check­­ing ev­ery­thing is im­­ple­­men­t­ed and se­­man­ti­­cal­­ly right.

• It has a (IMVHO) de­­cent struc­­ture for the Qt back­­end. It should be pos­si­ble to im­­ple­­ment ev­ery­thing us­ing it.

• The IUP peo­­ple know about it.

• It's still just my toy, AFAIK

So, its fu­ture seems to re­ly on me hav­ing time and en­er­gy to fin­ish it... and there's the catch.

I am Gim­li. I am not a marathon run­ner. We dwarves are nat­u­ral sprint­er­s! So, I can usu­al­ly cook up a de­cent project in a week or a mon­th, and then it lan­guish­es.

Spe­cial­ly be­cause I re­al­ly don't need Qt/I­UP.

I on­ly got here be­cause I was try­ing to learn D and I did­n't like any of their por­ta­ble toolk­it­s, and I found no bet­ter small C tool­kit I could wrap, and then I dis­liked it be­ing Mo­tif.

As you can see, an en­tire­ly too weak link from me to Qt/I­UP to be sus­tain­able.

I will try to push it to­day, im­ple­ment­ing the miss­ing wid­get­s, and see what hap­pen­s.