Mylos

Mylos is my home-grown weblog management software. I wrote my first web pages by hand in Emacs and RCS in 1993, but stopped maintaining them in 1996 or so. I only restarted one with Radio last year. After a year of weblogging, however, I find I am frustrated by the limitations of Radio as well as its web-based user interface (I am one of those rare people who prefer command-line user interfaces and non-WYSIWYG HTML editors). I guess I could have extended Radio using UserLand's Frontier language it is implemented in, but I have no interest in learning yet another oddball scripting language.

I decided in April 2003 to roll my own system, implemented in Python. In my career at various ISPs, I had to kill home-grown content-management system (CMS) projects gone awry, and I was certainly aware that these projects have a tendency to go overboard. Still, it has taken me three months of (very) part-time work to get the system to a point where it generates usable pages and imports my legacy pages from Radio without a hitch.

The implemented requirements for Mylos are:

• Migration of my existing Radio weblog entries and stories (done, but not in an entirely generic fashion, is theme-dependent)
• All pages are static HTML, no requirements for CGI scripts, PHP, databases or the like
• Implemented and extensible in Python
• Separation of content and presentation using themes (based on Webware Python Server Pages and CSS)
• Support for navigational hierarchy
• Articles are stored as regular files on the filesystem where they can be edited using conventional tools if necessary, no need for proprietary databases
• Extensible article metadata
• Atom 1.0 syndication, with separate feeds for subcategories
• Use only relative URLs in hyperlinks to allow easy relocation
• Automatic entry HTML cleanup for XHTML compliance
• A CSS-based layout where the blogroll doesn't wrap around short bodies (e.g. on permalink pages for short articles).
• reasonable defaults, e.g. don't try to create a weblog entry for an image that is colocated with an article, just copy it
• Built-in multithreaded external link validation.
• Automatic URL remapping (/mylos/ becomes relative to the Mylos root, relative URLs in an entry are automatically prefixed in containers like home pages).
• Ability to review an article before publishing
• Lynx compliance
• Automatically cache external images in weblog entries in case they disappear (but do not use them as such due to potential copyright issues)
• Set robots meta tag so only permalinks are indexed and cached by search engines, for better relevance to search engine users (albeit at the cost of lower rankings for the home page).
• Sophisticated image galleries fully integrated with the navigation
• Automatic code fragment colorization using Pygments

These features are planned but not yet implemented:

• Keyword index.
• Enhanced support for books via Allconsuming and Amazon.
• Automated dependency tracking to re-render only the pages affected by a change (via SCons)
• Multi-threaded rendering (via SCons)
• Automatically add height, width and alt tags to img tags
• Auto abbreviation glossary as tooltip help using <acronym> tags
• Typographically clean results, as done by SmartyPants
• Feedback loop via on-page comments
• Notification of new comments by email
• Ability to promote a weblog entry to a story if it reaches critical mass

These features are "blue-sky", don't hold your breath for them:

• Updates by email
• User-submitted ratings for articles
• Support for multilingual weblogs

Features thet are not planned at all (anti-requirements) include:

• Synchronization or upload to server - rsync does this far better
• Text editor - use $VISUAL or $EDITOR, whether Emacs, vi, or whatever
• Web user interface - Radio's web interface has very poor usability in my personal opinion, and this is due to the fact it is web-based, not any fault of Userland's
• RSS 1.0 - RDF seems like an exercise in intellectual masturbation
• Blogger API or similar - although someone else could certainly write a bridge in Python if needed

The software is currently not in a state where it can be used by anyone else. I am not sure if there is any demand for such a tool in any case, if so, I would certainly consider documenting it better and making a SourceForge project out of it.

By the way, the system is named "Mylos" after a city in the magnificent illustrated series "Les Cités Obscures" by Belgian architects and writers Schuiten and Peeters, more specifically L'Enfant Penchéee