blogs.gnome.org

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Hi guys,

Seth and I have spent the last day or so working on setting up blogging
software on gnome.org.  I set blogs.gnome.org to point to window, and
set up NewsBruiser there.  We looked at a lot of different blogging
software options, and decided on NewsBruiser for a couple reasons:

 * It is clean python, and is pretty hackable.  It also has a very
   responsive maintainer, who replies to mails quickly.

 * It is nicely multi-user.  We can give blog accounts to people without
   having them have a shell or mysql account.

 * It has a fairly customizable appearance.  The default install is
   pretty bad, but Seth has cleaned it up quite a bit locally.  We're
   going to move the new appearance over later.

 * It has really nice importing scripts, so migrating existing blogs
   over should be easy.

 * It has a really simple file format on disk.  There is no fooling with
   databases, and migrating from it looks simple.  If we change our mind
   later, we will be in good shape.

 * NewsBruiser works nicely with things like gnome-blog and its ilk.

I made a 'blog' user for the software to run as, and a 'blog' group.
People in the group should be able to sudo to the blog user.  One of the
problems with NewsBruiser is that it interacts a little badly with
suexec, and we weren't able to get it to install in /usr/local/www like
the other content (and like the wiki does.)  As a result, all the data
and software is in /var/www.  I don't think that this is that bad,
though, and I made a comment to this effect in the wiki page.

Later this afternoon, Seth is going to move his stylesheet changes over
to window and we'll experiment with moving a few blogs over.  Once we're
more sure that it works well, I'll make an announcement.  There are a
few open issues:

 * The current URL is ugly.  I'd like to do some modrewrite changes to
   make it so that blogs.gnome.org/$person goes to the right page.

 * Currently, every page is dynamically created.  It would be good to
   have a way to make certain pages 'static' for the occasional slashdot
   hits.  We're still getting a _lot_ of traffic to seth's luminocity
   page.

 * We don't really have a privacy or acceptable usage policy.  This is
   not a change from the current situation, but if we're expanding this
   service beyond pybloxsom-in-public_html, it might be wise to start
   this.

Any comments or thoughts?  Do people here want blogs too?

Thanks,
-Jonathan