I had some time this weekend and started cleaning up the non core plugins I am using on this website. The Folksonomy plugin is one of my most favourite ones. It not only creates the tag-links and tagcloud on this site it also provides the related story links at the bottom of each article.

The only small nitpick I had was that it had to parse every post for every request. With the small number of articles on this site, this is not a problem but I wanted to fix it anyway. Utilizing the new command-line functionality of pyblosxom 1.5 I created a small cache file creation command that creates the majority of the data. During this process I also decided to put this plugin up on GitHub so other people can use it.

Please note the initial author of this plug-in is Timothy Fanelli he did the majority of the work. I just made it work with pyblosxom 1.5 and added the caching functionality.

I recently played around with the folksonomy plugin just to notice that it does not really like the $relatedstories and $relatedtags variables. Digging around in the code I saw that something fishy was happening with the way the folksonomy table got created. I tried to understand what happened there exactly but failed miserably. But yesterday I had an aha moment. Martin really, really helped my figuring out

• What the code is supposed to create
• Why I did not work as expected
• Rewrite it in a way that it actually works

So after some hacking we got it working again. Without further ado take a look at the entries and phear the power of related stories.

I stil need to find a nicer CSS layout but hey I still have a few days of my holidays left to fix it.

First post with the new/old blog system. I used pyblosxom before, then took a break, switched to wordpress and then once more came back to pyblosxom. There are several reasons for it.

1. Ease of use

   Although the setup seems more complicated, pyblosxom is easier to use. All you have to do is to create text files. Wordpress on the other hand, while easy to set-up, is operated via a web interface. Yes of course you can use one of the available blog editors to create new entries or even use the mail interface, but then it gets more complicated.

2. Pythonic flavour

   So you edit you posts with a nice editor upload it to your blog/database and are happy with it. If you like it this way go on and use other blogging tools. Pyblosxom on the other hand is very close to the first blogging system widely used blosxom with the difference that it is written in python instead of perl. If you want to use blosxom instead of pyblosxom go on and do it I won't stop you. The thing is, blogging started as a fast way to get your ideas/thoughts/ramblings postet with out much thinking about the layout. We should really go back to the basics and do this.

3. Funkiness

   Databases and PhP are really great fun but what nothing beats playing with Python.

To be continued......