PyBlosxom Hacks and Plugins

PyBlosxom is a lightweight weblog system written in Python and it is the software that I use to run my own weblog, copyrighteous. It originally started out as a Python clone of Blosxom. While it has diverged and improved — "blossomed" if you will — with time, the basic ideas behind PyBlosxom (e.g., simplicity, use of the filesystem as a database) have remained central.

PyBlosxom is extremely modular and easily extensible. In my course of using the software, I have submitted a number of patches to PyBlosxom and written a variety of plugins and extensions. Several of these can be found in the PyBlosxom Plugin Registry but the canonical home of all of them is this page.

If you you use or try any of these have a patch, improvement, suggestion, question, or a bug you'd like to tell me about, feel free to email me at mako@atdot.cc or contact me using any of the ways mentioned on my contact page.

My Plugins

• Akismet Comments: This plugin merges the work of two plugins by myself and Blake Winton. The comment uses the API of akismet.py and provides a simple plugin with callbacks appropriate for use in PyBlosxom. You use it, you must install aksimet.py and put it somewhere in the PYTHONPATH (e.g., in the PyBlosxom plugins directory). Additionally, the package now also contains a small command line utility for reporting any false negative comments as spam to the central akismet database and a short README file including documentation.
  Version: 0.3
  Download: akismet_comments-0.3.tar.gz
  Documentation: README
• Hierarchical Archives: After several years of blogging, I found that the list of Archives on the side was getting extremely long. I rewrote the plugin archive so that it support creating a hierarchical (by year) archive list which can easily made collapsed and collapsible with a little bit of Javascript. I have documented doing this in the documentation for this plugin. You can see an example of what you can do with this apparently subtle improvement on my blog copyrighteous. This plugin is closely based on the original archives plugin. If the current PyBlosxom maintainers like it, this plugin may eventually replace the old Archives plugin.
  Version: 0.1
  Download: hierarchical_archives-0.1.tar.gz
• Selective Ads Plugin: This very simple plugin is designed to include advertisement text onto a page if, and only if the page request is referred from a search engine. The idea is that a blog owner may want to show advertisements to those who have found the blog by searching but not to their core readership. In reality, the machinery is more general. The plugin displays an arbitrary string on your blog if the referrer of the requests matches any of a set of patterns or regular expressions.
  Version: 0.1
  Download: selective_ads-0.1.tar.gz

Patches and Improvements

• Stronger "NoSpam" CATPCHA Plugin Patch: Steve Armstrong's NoSpam plugin is easily defeatable by many spambots. I have borrowed code from the CAPTCHA used by MediaWiki's FancyCaptcha and built a much stronger NoSpam plugin. To use it, you will need to apply my patch to the upstream nospam module plugin.
  Download: patch
• Non-Indexed Comments Flavor (Anti-Spam): In a blog post, I described, in some depth, how to split a default HTML flavor into two flavors that will ensure that search engines can index the content of the blog without index the comments. You can read and reproduce the flavor by reading the documenation in the link below.
  Documentation: blog entry