As part of the current upgrade effort, I decided it was time to go through and tag older blog entries, the ones written before the introduction of tags. These entries were categorized, and the filesystem was used to manage the categorization. Each directory represented a category, and each subdirectory a subcategory. The directories were given descriptive names, suitable for use with the pycategories plugin for pyblosxom.
An obvious approach to automating the retagging of these old entries was to use the category hierarchy itself to provide the tags. I wrote a python program to walk the directory tree, and add tags to the old entries.
I chose to ignore the general
category, though, because as a
tag general
doesn't provide much information. I think I might try
a more sophisticated approach to those entries, analyzing the content of
the entry to choose tags. I haven't worked out all the details, yet, but
I'm considering building a map of tagged entries, based on the frequency
of certain words or phrases that appear in them, then applying that map
to a histogram of the entries currently categorized as
general
.
Well, comments and authentication are working, however I moved to the off-the-shelf comments module, which has it's own scheme for comment formatting, most notably substituting <br /> for newlines in the comment body.
I should merge my changes to parse HTML and include it in the comment database as CDATA. Maybe I can do that today.
Also, it's time to bring back the sidebar, with the tagcloud, linkroll, feeds, a flickr, etc.
I'm with several feeds to display, I'm going to revisit a generalized approach, with decoupled retrieval/caching and parsing/display.
Finally, I'd like to put a related tags
list on each tag
page, a feature not currently supported by the tag plugin.
There are some features missing from Get Up 8, notably comments and feeds. Those should be back soon. I've cleverly used mod_rewrite to preserve Seven Falls permalinks that might be floating around, and rewriting them to the new style of URL.
After the functionality is there, it'll be time to turn to styling and sidebars. I'm getting away from categories, opting for web-2.0-ier tags instead.
Watch this space...
This is my first new post since kfial went down. It's taken me a while to get going again. (Actually I got mail and other sites up pretty fast, but it has been a while for the blog.)
Mostly, the delay has been due to my internal struggle between getting it back up as fast as possible—clearly a failure—and completely overhauling the look and feel and organization of the site. I finally came down somewhere in the middle.
As you might guess from the new title, Get Up 8 and the very raw style, things will be changing. I haven't decided entirely how yet, but I have some ideas to implement over the next couple of weeks. At the same time, I'll be getting the older entries online real soon now.
I wanted more flexibility than was offered by the various chart options offered by last.fm to show the music I've been listening to, so a wrote a configurable plugin to convert a last.fm RSS feed for use on a Pyblosxom blog.
I've been running it for a while, but just got around to adding the last feature I wanted: the ability to use an existing cache if the last.fm feed shows no tracks. From time to time, it seems that last.fm just clears your list. I think it's supposed to be based on some timeout, but I've had it happen while between a pair of back-to-back tracks. Anyway, I'd rather keep the existing list around in that case, and with that feature, it's ready for release.
Like flixq it uses the elementtree module to parse the feed.