StaticBlog (my Python flat-file blog) is up and running. Of course, given the short time I've been able to work on it, it's missing most of the features I'd like it to have.

I started writing StaticBlog a few days ago as the tool to manage my personal web site, based on a few considerations:

• blogs change a few times per day at most (if we exclude features like trackback and comments, which can be easily implemented on separate scripts or -- better -- not implemented at all)
• you don't need a database for a blog since entries are few, sorted only on date or category, and indexes have to be built anyway for menus or archives
• I don't like CGIs =)
• there are lots of really good apps to write blog entries, a few of them even come preinstalled on modern PCs, they're called editors (and if you're like me, you spend most of your waking time in fron of one)
• did I mention that I hate CGIs?
• static pages are faster than dynamic pages and they're cache-friendly and searchbot friendly by default
• I much prefer working from the command line than using a web interface

If you're reading this, it means StaticBlog is (at least partially) working. What I've managed to hack together so far:

• filesystem based entries and categories, more or less like Pyblosxom (using the wonderful path Python module)
• modular converters (.txt, .html, and .rst do far) to convert entries
• input encoding support (since I'm Italian I'm pretty sensitive to it, things like àèìòù should work)
• template based (via simpleTAL)
• monthly archiving (partially done)
• parsing only of the actually modified entries and HTML generation only of the actually modified pages (thanks to the shelve module)
• rc based configuration with sensible defaults (at least for Unix systems)

What I'd like to add soon:

• RSS generation (it's already built in, I only need to write the XML template and feed it to TAL) update: as you can probably see, RSS is working now generating an RSS 0.91 feed for each category; I'm thinking of adding an RSS 2.0 feed (it's just a matter of creating the template) to use entry dates, etc.
• logging support, using the 2.3 logging module
• new entry submission to blog engines (via XMLRPC? is it really a nice feature? hmmmm have to investigate this a bit)
• support for formats needing external converters, like LaTeX or Office docs (I really only need to write a converter for them)
• completing the half done features ofc =)
• improving the architecture maybe by planning it a bit =)