PyBlosxom Hacks and Plugins

PyBlosxom is a lightweight weblog system written in Python and it is the software I used to run my weblog, copyrighteous, for many years before switching to WordPress. 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 submitted a number of patches to PyBlosxom and wrote a variety of plugins and extensions, all of which are documented below.

My Plugins

• Akismet Comments: This plugin merges the work of two plugins by myself and Blake Winton. The package uses the API of akismet.py and provides a simple plugin with callbacks appropriate for use in PyBlosxom. To use it, you must install akismet.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 supports creating a hierarchical (by year) archive list which can easily be 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
• Markdown2: A small PyBlosxom plugin that renders blog entries written in Markdown using the markdown2 Python library.
  Source: gitlab.com/makoshark/pyblosxom-markdown2
• 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" CAPTCHA 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 indexing the comments. You can read and reproduce the flavor by reading the documentation in the link below.
  Documentation: blog entry

Conversion Tools

• pyblosxom2wxr: A fork of an upstream tool for converting a PyBlosxom blog into WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) format for import into WordPress.
  Source: gitlab.com/makoshark/pyblosxom2wxr