tcjblog.py

I’ve now (for the most part) finished a working version of some software I’ve wanted to tackle for a while. I call it tcjblog.py. It’s a blog platform built using jemdoc.py to format simple text files into nice looking HTML. What’re the benefits of this, and features of tcjblog.py in general?

• Simple, text file management of blog posts. (I control these with git.)

• Ability to include LaTeX markup.

• Static HTML for all blog-related pages

• Entries show up on an index of all posts, the category associated with the post, and the month the post was made.

• An RSS feed displays the formatted entries nicely for RSS readers.

• Indexes split posts 10 per page.

• Entry URLs are a sanitized version of the page title, so they’re auto-perma-links, at least once you’re happy with a title.

There’s still a fair bit of work for it, but probably it’s time to focus a bit on the content and less on the software, at least until it seems more pressing. This has been a great couple-afternoon project for me–a nice break from the almost 5000 lines of numerical/algorithms stuff in C++ I’ve done in the last couple of weeks.

It’s worth noting that the static approach generates a fair number of files for this approach: one for each entry, one for each category, and one for each month, plus a tenth of the total number again for the index pages. So I use a makefile to manage all of it.