MadMode

A couple years ago, I started using blogger because I wanted immersive hypermedia editing, and I wanted it for free. Well, you get what you pay for.

Using a database-backed, through-the-web blogging tool was a big change for me, after over a decade of using version-controlled static files at W3C. Aaron Swartz put it in bumper-sticker form: Bake, Don't Fry.

The promise of immersive hypermedia editing didn't quite pan out. Yes, blogger lets you drop in images and videos. But I'm still all knotted up about media management. I tried to ignore the fact that paragraphs are separated by <br/> tags, but not all the problems are invisible. It lets you copy-and-paste chunks of hypertext; but it tries to preserve not just the structure but the formatting too, and the result is a mess.

Writing on mobile gizmos isn't quite there yet either. I wrote a six page letter with two thumbs on my sidekick years ago, but since going to a touchscreen, that's not happeneing. Voice recognition is getting really close, but it still requires a little manual clean-up, and with no cursor keys, editing is maddening. Besides, when I want to post "look what my dog just coughed up!" ephemera, I use twit-face-plus, not my own imprint.

Static site generators are making a comeback, riding the distributed version control wave. I bookmarked Octopress under publishing in Oct 2011:

ooh... interesting. nice style/fonts, bake-don't-fry, lots of goodies.

I'm reluctant to add ruby to my toolset. Nothing against it; it's just too close to python for comfort... like when my mom studied both Spanish and French and got the vocabulary mixed up. It took me years to flush perl out of my system; I'm not going back.

But Octopress was so far ahead of the python-based offerings that I did try it one afternoon. I got as far as "2. Install Ruby 1.9.3 ..." but that version wasn't in my apt sources and I wasn't in the mood to build from source, so I punted.

Finally I found a flask-based static blog generator by Nicolas Perriault. For building web apps at work, I picked pyramid over flask because flask seemed to rely on globals, but for a front-side-of-one-page tool, I'm fine with it.

His site is organized around sections; I was able to rip those out and replaced them with tags without much trouble:

def tag_counts(pages):
    all_tags = [tag for pg in pages
                for tag in pg.meta.get('tags', ())]
    count_tags = [(tag, len(list(tag_group)))
                   for tag, tag_group in groupby(sorted(all_tags))]
    return sorted(count_tags, key=lambda x: x[0].lower())

...

@app.route('/search/label/<string:tag>.html')
def search_tag(tag):
    template = 'archives.html'
    articles = get_pages(pages, tag=tag)
    return render_template(template, pages=articles, tag=tag)

I'm still working out the details of publishing the source, but here's the change log, lightly edited:

• migrated published madmode items from blogger
  990356e3476f 42: +1291/-0

• Merge flask work
  bc689b10191e 108: +8711/-0

  • snapshot of madmode sitemap for migration from blogger
    a6223bc11053 2: +28815/-0 see also sitemap.py
  • blogger snapshot for Flask migration
    a3a43c581955 1: +1789/-520

• use .html for /search/label/tag pages, for now
  a1d40734bc0b 1: +1/-1

• scrub remaining occurrences of Nicolas, esp. contact.html
  56b91790e57a 8: +24/-46
• show tags in article listings and on articles
  1b24ba141732 4: +16/-3
• polish up madmode homepage: copy, title, acks; archive links
  598ef5591769 5: +71/-33
• browse archives by year or by year-month to match blogger urls
  89069d50ddf0 3: +45/-9
• add tag cloud
  e65884962fa8 4: +53/-2
• toward section-less site: home page renders
  536f1692c20c 4: +16/-67
• migrate_blogger.py seems to mostly work
  5a65ceeb9661 1: +76/-2
• migrate_blogger.py can iterate through posts
  7c075b5ffefc 1: +22/-0
• re-brand for MadMode, 1st draft
  874bc9b83067 6: +16/-48
• prune pages by Nicolas
  4380ba01e181 80: +0/-2243

I'm releasing it now before analysis paralysis sets in again, but there are still a few things to clean up and there are, of course, a number of features on my wish list:

• side-by-side preview editing, a la trac wysiwyg or AaronSw's jottit
• comments? twitter track-back, disquss comments
• recent diigo bookmarks, highlights
• recent commits from github/bitbucket
• collect my tweets etc. into weekly items, a la Tim Bray and Norm Walsh
• jsmath
• goodies from pelican