Goodbye PyBlosxom, Hello Cherryblosxom!

As I said I would, I had a poke around the relevant PyBlosxom plugins in an attempt to figure out why the anti-spam question feature was playing havoc. To cut a long story short, I did not succeed. In the process of failing, I was driven near insane by what seemed like inexplicably inconsistent behaviour by Pyblosxom. This might be due to PyBlosxom being a low quality product or it might be due to me not understanding what I was doing.

Regardless of the cause, I decided that a change was due. I wanted to use a blogging platform whose ability to "just work" I could have some degree of trust in. I turned, first, to Wordpress, because, well, everybody else does (mass popularity of software, in my experience, is a terrible metric for software quality, but generally is a good metric for "ease of just getting the damn thing to do what you basically want it to do"). One minute through their "famous five minute install" I discovered that Wordpress only works with MySQL as a backend database. Seriously lame. MySQL is one of the aforementioned cases of software popularity being a terrible metric for software quality. My server uses PostgreSQL and I really didn't feel like installing a second RDBMS on an already over-strained machine just for a blog. Heck, I really didn't want my blog to rely on a database at all.

So I bit the bullet and did something similar to what I threatened to do back when I first set up commenting in PyBlosxom, and wrote my own blogging platform, in Python, using CherryPy to handle the HTTP request routing stuff and Cheetah to handle the templating. This new platform is entirely filesystem based, like PyBlosxom and Blosxom before it - no databases are necessary. I'm tentatively naming it "CherryBlosxom", acknowledging the fact that CherryPy does all the hard stuff and that it follows in the idealogical footsteps of Blosxom and PyBlosxom, being that it tries to be as small and simple as possible.

If you're reading this entry, it means that I've made the switch and this blog is now powered by CherryBlosxom - an extremely alpha version of CherryBlossxom, which has not been thoroughly debugged and is missing some features (like RSS and Atom feeds, which I hope to eventually provide with feedformatter). It's entirely possible that features like archive links and tag links and commenting will not work entirely properly just yet. I am hoping to have the most severe bugs taken care of pretty quickly, in which case I'll call what's there 0.1 and formally release it. In the mean time, please try to use the blog like you usually would and if anything breaks drop me a line. I'm looking forward to making CherryBlosxom a polished product!