That said, 0.6 is a major milestone in Blogofile development and I'm happy to see the product mature as many people have helped out on the mailing list by giving great suggestions as well as patches.

Changelog (in rough chronological order):

• Posts can now have arbitrary user-defined fields.
• Added Controllers, which enables users to write their own extensions to Blogofile in userspace. Blogofile no longer has any intrinsic knowledge of what a 'blog' is, this is all controlled in userspace inside a new _controllers directory.
• Added Filters, which enables people to write their own text processors, for example: syntax highlighters.
• Easily debuggable in Winpdb by setting the BLOGOFILE_DEBUG=t environment variable. (this is equally usable by actual Blogofile core developers, or in your own user extensions).
• Non-broken unicode support throughout templates and blog posts.
• Lots of unit tests.
• reStructuredText support for blog posts.

Thanks again to the many supporters of Blogofile!

I really like the current Blogofile. It's running both blogofile.com and enigmacurry.com (my personal blog) quite well. But we're not done yet. Blogofile started out as a personal project so that I could build my own sites the way I wanted to, and although that has been greatly expanded so that other's could start using the app too, there's still a bit left in Blogofile that is a bit, shall we say, hard coded for the way I like to build sites. Blogofile is soon going to get an overhaul that will allow it create a much more diverse range of types of Blogs, as well as other types of sites, while still trying to keep the simple sites simple. A fine, delicate, line to walk to be sure, but I think it'll make for a better Blogofile. I'm excited to get working on these enhancements, but before we get ahead of ourselves, and seeing as the master branch is looking pretty good the way it is, it's time for a new release of Blogofile.

New, for Blogofile 0.5 (roughly in commit order):

• Syntax highlighting of page templates.
• New Python _config.py file replaces config.conf. This change really appeals to me, we have something that resembles Emacs style configuration rather than a Windows INI file.
• init command that spits out a skeleton of a Blogofile site in the current directory, with multiple templates to choose from.
• Blogofile is now MIT licensed.
• Lots of new unit tests.
• Org-mode mark up for posts
• Automatic permalink generation if you don't explicitly set it in the post.
• Replaced OptParse with ArgParse for better command line UI.
• New documentation.

You can install the new version with a simple:

sudo easy_install -U blogofile

I've also started a mailing list for all thing Blogofile related. Please feel free to give feedback, ask questions, or suggest new features there.

Nothing terribly major, but it does represent a maturing product:

• Less buggy syntax highlighting now with a home-grown <pre> tag parser
• EnigmaCurry.com, my personal blog, is now powered by Blogofile. This shows that real blogs can and do run Blogofile.

• Syntax highlighting - thanks to pygments
• Markdown support - thanks to markdown in python

Check out some examples here

I just released version 0.3 on github as well as on PyPI.

One thing I really hate about wordpress though, is writing blog posts in their stupid in browser editor. It's not really Wordpress' fault, no one has ever built a decent in browser editor (although that may change), so I use Emacs to write all my blog posts.

At first I used the It's all text firefox extension to be able to edit browser text fields inside of Emacs. This is a nice solution, and I use it all the time. However, when I'm writing blog entries, I'm kind of a perfectionist, often editing a post a couple dozen times before feeling done with it. It got rather tedious to keep switching between Emacs and firefox each time I would save my changes. I wanted a way that I could publish to my blog directly in Emacs.

As it turns out, there are several packages for Emacs that will publish to blog engines using xml-rpc:

• weblogger.el (Tolchz.net version)
• weblogger.el (The original?)
• blog.el
• wp-emacs

I've tried them all. They all either didn't work, or didn't work how I wanted them to, so I started to write my own, but got frustrated and realized that I probably couldn't improve on what had already been done.

I briefly played with the idea of creating a FUSE based filesystem interface to wordpress, where when I wrote a file to a specific directory it would automatically post or update a blog entry on my blog. I wrote the original interface, but then I found Jekyll.

Wow! Jekyll is awesome. Most blog engines have a database that when a user requests a page the engine queries the database for the post and renders an HTML page on the fly. This frees the author from having to create an HTML page everytime they want to post to their site, but it gets a bit computationally expensive to render that page everytime a user requests one. Why not generate the page one time and be done with it? That's exactly what Jekyll does, it prerenders your entire website from a set of templates and then you upload that rendered site to your webhost (or have git do it for you with a post-receive hook).

Two things about Jekyll prevent me from using it though, it's brand new and doesn't have all the nice features that wordpress has, like categories and tags and such. Also, it's written in Ruby. I hear Ruby is a fine language, but I don't know it. So I wanted something similar in Python.

So this is Blogofile, something quite similar to Jekyll, but written in Python. Jekyll is made more for websites of arbitrary structure, although it does blogs quite well. Blogofile is targeted specifically for blogs. It integrates categories, tags, rss/atom feeds, rss/atom feeds per category, comments and trackbacks, like a good blog should.

Major props go out to Tom Preston-Werner for creating Jekyll. I hope the jekyll project continues to do well!