Commenting feature added, pyBlosxom headaches

As some of you may have noticed, this blog now features comments. I set this up over last Thursday and Friday. It wasn't a straight forward procedure, and during these few days you may have encountered various problems with my website - even for parts of it that have nothing to do with the blog, because at one stage the internal URL rewrites that I asked lighttpd to do were stupid ones, owing to my inexperience with regular expressions. I apologise if this caused you trouble, everything should be working fine now.

The entire experience has rather substantially dented my confidence in PyBlosxom as a blogging platform. Certainly, I enjoy its flat-file simplicity and naturally far prefer to be using something written in Python rather than PHP, but the fact that the majority of its functionality is provided by third party plugins of an apparently mediocre quality - and certainly of ephemeral availability - with documentation that varies from non-existent to outright inaccurate does not give me warm fuzzy feelings. I'll probably write an entry or two about the problems I've had in the coming weeks.

I have been entertaining grandiose plans of writing my own Pythonic blogging platform, based on CherryPy (which looks so genuinely fantastic that I can't wait to use it for something) and Cheetah, which has served me well as part of my current home-brew system for generating this site. I would assuredly stick with flat text files over a database, although I may use an SQLite database for some things if I thought it would afford a significant gain in performance or code simplicity without too much an increase in overall complexity. This is probably a pipe dream anyway, and certainly not something I could throw together in a hurry.

Until such a time comes as I write this imaginary CherryBlog, I think I will slowly devote time to hacking on PyBlosxom in an attempt to make it more usable. I'll blog about anything half way decent that I come up with.

On a performance note, you may have noticed that the blog pages of this site are now substantially slower to load than they have been in the past. At the moment, PyBlosxom is running as a plain old CGI process, which of course means that the whole thing is as slow as it possibly could be. But that's not to say it's necessarily slow, of course. Under the super light load that this blog is currently getting things are bearable. I do intend to migrate away from CGI at some stage, if I don't write my won system first - there is a WSGI version of PyBlosxom which I should be able to hook up to lighttpd using Allan Saddi's flup library and either FastCGI or SCGI. Barry Pederson has provided a starting point for this in his own PyBlosxom blog. I've had quite enough of tinkering with this blog for a while, though, so this may not happen for a month or so.