Thom Nichols

Thom

Technology is evolution outside the gene pool

2 Dec. 9, 2009

I Wrote the Code for this Blog

Well, not all of it.  The software for this blog is a derivative of Bloog, originally written by Bill Katz.  It runs entirely on Google AppEngine for Python, and it is completely open source.  I took Bill's code and forked it on GitHub, and worked on a lot of improvements over the the course of several months. 

Here are a few of the more significant changes I've made:

  • Recaptcha support for comments
  • Image upload & hosting for blog entries
  • Tag cloud (rather than straight list)
  • Summary and full-content Atom feeds
  • "View source" when composing entries. (from this YUI example)
  • Inline <code> and <pre> tags for comments
  • Pluggable YUI version
  • Updated SyntaxHighlighter to latest hosted version
  • Cache improvements
  • Minified all JS and CSS files
  • Editable publish date and legacy ID mapping for entries
  • Pluggable Google Analytics support
  • Support for Blogger.com migration
  • Mobile stylesheet

I'm enjoying playing with Bloog (and learning Python along the way) so I plan on continuing as long as I can think of interesting things to twiddle.  You can find my code changes on GitHub.  Some other planned features are listed on the wiki as well. 

(Comments are closed)

2 Comments

  1. avatar Re: Major Bloog Improvements Jan. 16, 2010 Benjamin

    I am impressed by the amount of changes you made. I am sure this can be helpful to many people. 

    I stumbled over the line "support for blogger.com migration," as I haven't noticed it earlier. This is a feature I find very important. In the readme file supplied with the source code it writes:
    *Blogger legacy URL mapping support. 

    Is this what you refer to in the post?

    Is there support for XML import? (an XML export feature would be also very nice to have, btw)

  2. avatar Re: Blogger support Jan. 17, 2010 Thom

    Hi Ben,

    I didn't update the bulk importer, but I did provide a mapping so that when you've specified 'legacy_blog_software'="Blogger" in config.py, it will know how to map your old legacy IDs to permalinks generated by Bloog.  However I only had a couple entries in Blogger before migrating, so I manually copied them into newposts and set the legacy ID one at time. 

    Bulk import support probably isn't a bad idea, but I'd have to figure out how entries are exported from Blogger.