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.