Sunday, November 8, 2009

Eating your own dogfood

Since way back in 2007 when I blogged about JSON and Python I've used blogspot as my blog engine. I've never been completely happy with it because it didn't easily support code coloration. Still, it worked, had great up time, and I got used to it.

Recently though on twitter I've been getting a few dings about using python to host my blog. And since I've now captured pydanny.com and pydanny.net it makes even more sense. I toyed a few times with writing my own blog engine but while I've done it for my job, I never wanted to do it for myself.

So I've been shopping around for what I consider the best blog engine for me. I had a lot of great options thanks to a blog engine query asked in April. In the end we just extended the Pinax blog engine with a few widgets and that was good enough. Anyway, recently I started to look at those again as viable options.

However, one more option presented itself. Kevin Fricovsky's Mingus. It has everything I want in a blog, and also seems to closely follow what I would like to think I would have done in my blog. That is, to say, he fetched bits and pieces from all over the Django ecosphere and assembled them into one universal whole. Yup, I like it a lot.

So my plan is over the next week or so is to set it up on a Webfaction account and start blogging from there.

24 more posts to go! (I'm behind on days but plan to make it up with posts)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Mingus is really nicely done. I use it for my own blog, and if you want inspiration, I run my own blog off a branch to my own Mingus fork. There's a few different customisations, mainly Atom-feeds over RSS and using django-threadedcomments instead of Disqus.

Unknown said...

Are you planning on documenting the steps you followed to set up django-mingus on webfaction? I tried a while back, and ran into some issues, so I'd be interested in seeing some better step by step instructions..

pydanny said...

@Mikkel, I'll check out your work since I like Atom a lot.

@mwarkentin, I'll definitely blog about my efforts! :)

Unknown said...

I am using App Engine (so... free hosting!) and using Micolog: http://code.google.com/p/micolog/

My Blog is at: http://www.livingubuntu.com

It is easy, free, and works with your new domain!

kevin said...

Great to hear! I have a few requests to pull additions into Mingus core, but I've been swamped with moving my home. I should be able to get some in this week. But the 0.8.3 version is well and good enough as is without these pull requests being merged.

@Mikkel - I'll ping you about your customizations. Maybe if I give you the commit access to Mingus you can work on getting these features in?