{ A personal weblog publishing system written
in python, and designed with simplicity
and robustness in mind. }

pyllbox

If you're looking for a bloat-free weblog publishing system that concentrates on the important things such as augmentation of entries and the ability to withstand a slashdotting, and whose embellishments are limited to a comments & feedback system and RSS feed, then pyllbox may be for you.

Pyllbox is a lightweight set of scripts and templates written as the backend of the miscoranda weblog, and released under GPL 2. Requirements: Apache, Python 2.1.3 or later. There's an example installation on the Web for you to test and edit.

Installing Pyllbox

There are more extensive instructions in the README file, but the summary is:

You'll probably want to password protect posting entries to your weblog. To do so, uncomment the "# " prefix lines in the .htaccess file, and fill in the obvious missing information using the Apache Authentication How-To guide if you get stuck.

Using Pyllbox

All posts can be created, edited, and deleted by going to /post.cgi on your server.

Options:
There is only one option, and that is whether to allow comments on weblog entries or not. They are turned on by default. To turn them off, simply delete the "comments" directory. You'll probably want to edit "entry.t" to remove the links to the comments, too.
Changing the look and feel:
All of the *.t and *.txt files are the templates that pyllbox uses to make your site. You can edit them if you want to make structural changes, and style.css for stylistic changes.
Rebuilding:
You can rebuild files using the post.cgi form: the choice is "archives" for the weblog's post archives, "YYYY-MM" for a particular month in the archive, "index.rdf" for the RSS feed, and "*" for all files. Pyllbox will rebuild the relevant files when you make, edit, or delete an entry, so you shouldn't have to worry about rebuilding.

As for robustness, miscoranda recently had a small city's worth of hits from its Gmail entries, and pyllbox plodded along wonderfully serving tens of thousands of visitors in a couple of days. If you're interested, take a peek at the python source of the main CGI.

Troubleshooting

Most problems will be caused by your Apache configuration being different to the author's. Make sure that all the directories can be written to by the scripts, of course, and that permissions are such that .cgi files will be executed and everything else read.

Note that the comments feature expects that the comments will be held in the "/comments" directory on your server. If this is not the case, you will need to edit the .htaccess in that folder.

Comments? Questions? Feedback?

Join #swhack on the Freenode IRC server; the pyllbox author is on as sbp. Or, if you prefer, you can email sbp(at)miscoranda.com.

Sean B. Palmer