New blog engine

2012-08-09

This blog has a new blog engine, the fifth one since I've started blogging in 1997.

1997-1999: Homebrewed Python engine

I wrote my first blog engine in Python. IIRC, it was a client-server system using some kind of remote calling protocol (probably homebrewed too) that generated static HTML content. The editor for the posts was VI.

Needless to say, it was a bit painful to use, and this was one of the reasons I stopped posting in 1999.

2005-2009: CPSBlog

Someone at Nuxeo (I think it was Ruslan Spivak, if I'm wrong please correct me) wrote a blog engine on top of CPS. We used it for quite a while, but let it rot after we switched to Java and Ruslan left the company.

2009-2011: Typepad

We decided to use Typepad as our corporate blog engine, for two main reasons:

  • we didn't have to host it ourselves
  • it was multiuser / multiblog.

In retrospect, this was an unfortunate decision, since Typepad was already loosing steam against Wordpress at the time, but Wordpress wasn't really multiblog so that was not an option.

Jan-Aug 2012: Octopress

Back to square one, I migrated all my existing content to Octopress, a static blog and website generator itself based on Jekyll.

It was relatively OK, but for some reason it didn't really invite me to start producing content again.

Aug 2012: New homebrewed Python-based dynamic engine

I've spent the last couple of days writing a new blog engine based on Flask and a new project I'm currently working on.

It should be in a state where it's already OK to post some content (using Marsedit as a client, using XML-RPC as the transport).

I've also taken some time to adapt (and tweak) a cool Octopress theme by Alessandro Melandri.

More technical details about the new platform (including its source code) in a couple of weeks.