Keyboard Philosopher

Well, it just wouldn’t feel like Christmas without coding. =)

I recently started using pyblosxom for my blogging software needs. I’ll discuss the reasons for this choice in a later post.

One minor annoyance about pyblosxom is that since the entries are regular files, the developer chose to base entry post dates on file mtimes. While this is a really cool idea for the sake of simplicity of design, it gets rather old having post times change when correcting typos. I end up touch(1)ing posts constantly.

Many users simply wrap their post edits in a shell script which will replace the original mtime after editing, but I didn’t feel like settling for this solution.

In the end I decided to write a pyblosxom plugin to base the post time off a #postdate metadata line in the post file, if one is present.

The plugin can can be found here: metadate.py. Details are in the header of the script. I will be submitting it to the pyblosxom plugin registry soon.

Happy holidays, everyone.