As you can see from the – modest – layout, the migration to the Python Desktop Server was successful. It's still a bit bumpy, I'll need to go through all the posts to iron out bugs and errors and fix formatting, and I'll also need to work out bugs from the software itself, but overall it worked out.
The only real downside: all the old comments are gone. Well, not gone, but they're no longer referenced here. Well, it's not much of a loss with around 12 comments.
Otherwise, I'll now probably get back to optimizing the tool, because with several hundred posts it apparently gets a bit slower again. Anyway, I have the source. And it's mine.
So after the next surgery, it would probably be better to check again whether half the surgical instruments aren't left in the abdomen
At Morons Dot Org you can find the original article.
Muensterland.org works with the Python Community Server, so here's a bit about it from me. The Python Community Server is an open source implementation of the xmlStorageSystem. This is a protocol based on XML-RPC for storing static content. Essentially, the Python Community Server is nothing more than a web server with a somewhat unconventional upload protocol and a few pre-made CGIs - there are comments on articles, there's a mail form, and a few simple ways to subscribe to a website as an RDF channel.
So what's the point of all this? Why the hype over this tool? Things really get interesting only when you use Radio UserLand as a client. This is because xmlStorageSystem is the protocol that Radio UserLand uses as its backend system. Radio Communities are controlled through it.
Radio UserLand is a combination of a news aggregator, a website designer, and a weblog tool. The news aggregator collects news from the internet and makes it available locally. The user can then post individual articles to their own weblog. Additionally, they can simplify their website design with fairly powerful functions. What's special about Radio UserLand is that it's essentially a local website on the user's computer. And from this website, replication to other servers can take place. This can happen via standard protocols like the Blogger API (where only weblog content is transported, the layout remains with the server operator), via FTP (where static HTML exports are created, essentially Radio is just an overblown mirror script, so interactive features are quite limited), and via xmlStorageSystem. And this closes the circle back to the Python Community Server, because it's nothing more than the implementation of the latter.
By the way, there's also a tool for Linux, but this is more oriented toward classical weblog tools and doesn't offer the advanced layout tools that Radio UserLand does. And of course, there's now also the Python Desktop Server, which essentially works like Radio. It's available for almost every POSIX platform where Python runs.
Otherwise: just register a weblog here and use it. Try it all out. Muensterland.org is free for now; anyone can set up a weblog there. It's - as you can tell from the domain - of course primarily intended for the Münsterland region, but others can participate too. There are expat Münsterlanders after all.