Copia

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I've finally had some time today, as I prepare for the holidays, to fix some things on Copia that have been broken for too long. Some of the highlights, especially concerning issues mentioned by readers (thanks, guys), are:

RSS 1.0 feed body fix. Added rss:description field for the RSS 1.0 feed, which fixes missing post bodies in readers such as Bloglines which don't support support content:encoded. I do truncate the field to 500 characters, according to the recommendation in the spec.

Single entry view title fix. Added entry titles for single entry pages. Before today, if you viewed this entry through the perma-link, the title would just say "Copia"; now it says "Copia ✏Copia housecleaning"). I've wanted to do this for a while, but I was having the devil of a time figuring out how to do it with PyBlosxom. A scolding from Dan Connolly forced me to chase down a fix. For other PyBlosxom users the trick is to use the comments plug-in, copy the head.* flavor file to comment-head.*, and then update to use the $title variable, which is the title of the entry itself ($blog-title is the title of the entire blog). In my case the updated HTML header template looks like:

<title>$blog_title &#x270F;$title</title>

I did get a report that Copia is incorrectly sending `Content-Type header text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1`, but when I check using the LiveHTTPHeaders extension for FireFox on Linux it reports the correct charset=UTF-8 from the server. If anyone else can corroborate this issue, please leave a comment with the specific URL from which you noticed the error, your platform and browser, and the HTTP sniffing tool were you using. Thanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I've finally had some time today, as I prepare for the holidays, to fix some things on Copia that have been broken for too long. Some of the highlights, especially concerning issues mentioned by readers (thanks, guys), are:

RSS 1.0 feed body fix. Added rss:description field for the RSS 1.0 feed, which fixes missing post bodies in readers such as Bloglines which don't support support content:encoded. I do truncate the field to 500 characters, according to the recommendation in the spec.

Single entry view title fix. Added entry titles for single entry pages. Before today, if you viewed this entry through the perma-link, the title would just say "Copia"; now it says "Copia ✏Copia housecleaning"). I've wanted to do this for a while, but I was having the devil of a time figuring out how to do it with PyBlosxom. A scolding from Dan Connolly forced me to chase down a fix. For other PyBlosxom users the trick is to use the comments plug-in, copy the head.* flavor file to comment-head.*, and then update to use the $title variable, which is the title of the entry itself ($blog-title is the title of the entire blog). In my case the updated HTML header template looks like:

<title>$blog_title &#x270F;$title</title>

I did get a report that Copia is incorrectly sending `Content-Type header text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1`, but when I check using the LiveHTTPHeaders extension for FireFox on Linux it reports the correct charset=UTF-8 from the server. If anyone else can corroborate this issue, please leave a comment with the specific URL from which you noticed the error, your platform and browser, and the HTTP sniffing tool were you using. Thanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Micah put my del.icio.us daily links tool to immediate use on his blog. He uncovered a bug in the character handling, which is now fixed in the posted amara_delicious.py file.

I usually invoke the script from cron, but Micah asked if there was an alternative. I've been meaning to hack up a poor man's cron for PyBlosxom and this gave me an additional push. The result is task_control.py.

A sort of poor man's cron for PyBlosxom, this plug-in allows you to specify tasks (as Python scripts) to be run only at certain intervals Each time the plug-in is invoked it checks a set of tasks and the last time they were run. It runs only those that have not been run within the specified interval.

To run the Amara del.icio.us daily links script once a day, you would add the following to your config file:

py["tasks"] = {"/usr/local/bin/amara_delicious.py": 24*60*60}
py["task_control_file"] = py['datadir'] + "/task_control.dat"

You could of course have multiple script/interval mappings in the "tasks" dict. The scripts are run with variables request and config set, so, for example, if running from task_control.py, you could change the line of amara_delicious.py from

BASEDIR = '/srv/www/ogbuji.net/copia/pyblosxom/datadir'

to

BASEDIR = config['datadir']

[Uche Ogbuji]

I added a new feature on Copia: Every day there will be an automated posting with mine and Chime's del.icio.us links from the previous day. You can see, in the previous Copia entry to this one, an example of the results.

What I think most cool is how easy it was to write, and how easy the resulting code is to understand. It's just 35 lines (including 7 lines of imports) , and in that it packs some useful features I haven't found in other such scripts, including:

• Full Unicode safety (naturally, I wouldn't have it any other way)
• support for multiple del.icio.us feeds, with tag by author
• tagging the PyBlosxom entry with the aggregated/unique tags from the del.icio.us entries

Here's the code. The only external requirement is Amara:

import os
import sets
import time
import codecs
import itertools
from datetime import date, timedelta

from amara import binderytools

TAGBASE = 'http://del.icio.us/tag/'

#Change BASEDIR and FEEDS to customize
BASEDIR = '/srv/www/ogbuji.net/copia/pyblosxom/datadir'
FEEDS = ['http://del.icio.us/rss/uche', 'http://del.icio.us/rss/chimezie']

now = time.gmtime()
timestamp = unicode(time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', now))
targetdate = (date(*now[:3]) - timedelta(1)).isoformat()

#Using Amara.  Easy to just grab the RSS feed
docs = map(binderytools.bind_uri, FEEDS)
items = itertools.chain(*[ doc.RDF.item for doc in docs ])
current_items = [ item for item in items
                       if unicode(item.date).startswith(targetdate) ]
if current_items:
    # Create a Markdown page with the daily bookmarks.
    dir = '%s/%s' % (BASEDIR, targetdate)
    if not os.path.isdir(dir):
        os.makedirs(dir)
    f = codecs.open('%s/%s/del.icio.us.links.txt' % (BASEDIR, targetdate), 'w', 'utf-8')

    # Pyblosxom Title
    f.write(u'del.icio.us bookmarks for %s\n' % targetdate)

    tags = sets.Set()
    for item in current_items:
        tags.update([ li.resource[len(TAGBASE):] for li in item.topics.Bag.li ])
    f.write(u'#post_time %s\n'%(timestamp))
    f.write(u'<!--keywords: del.icio.us,%s -->\n'%(u','.join(tags)))

    for item in current_items:
        # List of links in Markdown.
        title = getattr(item, 'title', u'')
        href = getattr(item, 'link', u'')
        desc = getattr(item, 'description', u'')
        creator = getattr(item, 'creator', u'')
        f.write(u'* "[%s](%s)": %s *(from %s)*\n' % (title, href, desc, creator))

    f.close()

Or download amara_delicious.py.

You can see how easily you can process RSS 1.0 in Amara. I don't think actual RDF parsing/processing is a bit necessary. That extra layer is the first thing that decided me against Matt Biddulph's module, in addition to his use of libxml for XML processing, which is also used in Roberto De Almeida's.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I have so much hacking to do on Copia's engine that it puts me off doing anything at all. The atom rendering bug I stumbled upon yesterday especially needs a look-in, but I suspect it would take a move from flavor to plug-in to fix it. I'm just honestly not all that bullish about hacking PyBlosxom right now. Not while I've been having so much fun with CherryPy lately.

A while ago Bill Mill said in a comment here:

I'm about halfway done with a "pyblosxom in cherrypy" thing I've been working on. It works, reads all my pyblosxom blogs, and can leave comments. I just need to refactor it to be more sensible and plugin-oriented.

That's the sort of sign I need in order to to hang on, but I do hope Bill works his way through the remaining half soon enough.

Speaking of CherryPy, recently spotted Cookbook entry: "A simple integration of a CherryPy web server, using Quixote template publishing, managed in its own thread."

[Uche Ogbuji]

This is the first attempt to post from the new Drivel 2.0 weblogging tool and it will probably be the last. For one thing, Drivel doesn't seem to support MetaWeblog, just Blogger 1.0 (I hope PyBlosxom gets Atom API supporrt soon). And then when I started it up for the first time I found myself staring at a "Sending/Receiving...Retrieving journal entries..." app-modal dialog for over three minutes while the progress indicator crawled along. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I've got into such a groove posting via e-mail that I'd have to be wowed from the get-go before I make a switch at this point. Maybe Drivel 3.0?

[Uche Ogbuji]

I finally broke down and made Copia safe for MSIE. When I first set up the site, I tweaked the IE look a bit, but it was such a frustrating exercise that I gave up once satisfied with its appearance on FireFox and Safari (I need to install Opera for testing). Last night I found this excellent Wiki resource and soon got things sorted out. In the process I was alerted to the fact that Copia gets rendered in quirks mode, which is not what we want. I think I know how to fix most of the problems, but some issues are buried in PyBlosxom and plug-ins code, I think, so it may have to wait until my next burst of energy before we can sport one of those fly "valid ?HTML ?" icons.

[Uche Ogbuji]

So I took the line of thought from Eve Maler and the hack from Tarek Ziadé and sprinkled rounded boxes throughout Copia (for Mozilla browsers only, should be regular, square boxes on others). I have a glass eye for Web design so someone will have to tell me whether the Copia look has turned to even more rubbish now.

[Uche Ogbuji]