Bloog developments

Bill Katz, the original author of Bloog, has kindly added me as a contributor on the official Bloog repository. I've pushed all my changes from my 'master' branch to it, and I'm working on getting the 'breaking' changes in.

Migrated!

I've now migrated this blog from Serendipity, the blogging package I was previously using, to Bloog, a blog platform written for App Engine. Before doing so, though, I made some fairly significant changes and improvements, including:
  • A Serendipity uploader script (so I can import my old articles).
  • (Limited) unit-testing.
  • A bunch of improvements suggested by Matteo Crippa, including:
- Comment notification by email to the blog owner.
- Gravatar support.
- SEO improvements.
- Sitemap support.
  • Theme inheritance, so new themes can be defined that make only minor modifications to existing ones, without needing to copy the entire theme.
  • Support for FirePython logging when logged in as an administrator.
  • Improvements to how comments and posts are stored and retrieved.
  • The option to use a Google Custom Search Engine instead of the built-in search.
  • Many code cleanups and minor bugfixes.
In the process, I've been learning the wonders of Git and Github, and I'm seriously impressed.

All my work is available in my own Github branch here. It has several branches; 'master' contains non-breaking changes from the original Bloog, 'breaking' consists of master plus any changes that are likely to break backwards compatibility or require running an upgrade script. 'matteocrippa.it' contains ...