This is the README file for bzero, a blogging tool.
http://www.myelin.co.nz/bzero/
Copyright (C) 2002-03, Phillip Pearson
All rights reserved.
bzero is free for personal use.
There is NO WARRANTY. It still has bugs: by using this code you accept that it is not perfect, and will quite likely do strange things from time to time.
[ That said, it seems reasonably stable at the moment and has never lost even a single one of my blog posts :-) ]
bzero's future is still being decided. It may end up as part of a commercial package, or it may not. Whatever happens, it's likely that the command-line version [this one] will remain free for personal use, however, so don't let the commercialness put you off.
If you have any suggestions, please get in touch. New ideas are always welcome!
bzero includes Mark Nottingham's RSS parser (b0lib/RSS.py), available from http://www.mnot.net/python/ and released under the following license:
THIS SOFTWARE IS SUPPLIED WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, AND MAY BE COPIED, MODIFIED OR DISTRIBUTED IN ANY WAY, AS LONG AS THIS NOTICE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP REMAIN.
Thanks, Mark.
bzero includes Brett Cannon's pure Python version of strptime (b0lib/strptime.py), available from the Python cookbook:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/56036
Thanks, Brett.
bzero includes Gonçalo Rodrigues's date manipulation code (b0lib/AspnDate.py), available from the Python cookbook:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/117215
Thanks, Gonçalo.
bzero is a blogging tool written entirely in Python, with the philosophy that using the system (OS / language) to do as much of the work for us as possible is a Good Thing:
For an example of what bzero is capable of, take a look at the weblog 'Second p0st'.
I put a bzero blog on every public community server I can find. So far there are eight or so. See if you can find them all ;-)
First install Python 2.2. If you want to get 'width' and 'height' tags in automatically-posted images, you also need to install the Python Imaging Library.
Under Debian GNU/Linux, you can get them both with this:
apt-get install python2.2 python2.2-xmlbase python2.2-imaging
On Windows, you need to download and run the Python install package from python.org, and the PIL installer from pythonware.com.
Now you can install bzero.
Untar the archive into a temporary directory, and as root, execute ./install in that directory.
# tar -vzxf bzero-0.xx.tar.gz
[...]
# cd bzero-0.xx/
# ./install
Installing bzero
#
Now the files are installed in /usr/local/lib/bzero, and /usr/local/bin/bzero is the main executable.
If you don't want to install it as root, just unpack it in a user directory and run from there. You will need to set the environment variable 'BZERO_LIB' to point to the directory containing the files for it to run.
Unpack the archive somewhere.
Before you run bzero, set the following environment variables:
set BZERO_LIB=c:\path\to\bzero
set EDITOR=c:\path\to\notepad.exe
For me, that would be:
set BZERO_LIB=c:\bzero
set EDITOR=c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe
... and when you run it, type 'python c:\path\to\bzero\bzero' ('python c:\bzero\bzero' if you have installed it in c:\bzero) instead of 'bzero' (see the usage examples below).
Type 'bzero' ('bzero.py' on Windows, making sure you are in the right directory first) to get some instructions on how to use it.
Once you've created a new blog (read the instructions that you get when you run 'bzero'), post by running:
bzero post blogname
This will open your editor (defined by the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variable, or /etc/alternatives/editor, or notepad.exe on Windows) with a blank post template.
Once you have finished editing, save the post. If using notepad.exe on Windows and you have used any multi-byte (e.g. Chinese, Japanese) characters, you may need to use Save As and change the file format to UTF-8.
Now publish the blog to your community server:
bzero send blogname
The following will bring up the most recent post in your editor:
bzero editlast blogname
You can create standalone web pages in bzero if you like. These are stored apart from the blog posts, and are rendered slightly differently. Any file with a .txt extension that you create under ~/.bzero/blogname/site/ will be rendered with the 'static.py' template and uploaded to your website.
They need to have the following two lines at the start:
%title title
%date dddd-dd-dd
(Replace title and dddd-dd-dd with your title and date.)
To mimic Radio's 'story' functionality, create a directory called ~/.bzero/blogname/site/stories/ and add .txt files there. Automatic indices will come later.
Note: Don't create site/index.txt, or it will conflict with your blog main page.
You can post general files (not blog posts or articles) to the server if you like.
Any files that are stored in the ~/.bzero/blogname/extra/ folder will be uploaded directly to your website without rendering.
To post an image, simply create an <img ...> tag in a post that links to the image you want to post.
If the image is not already on a web server somewhere, the following will save a copy to be published along with your weblog HTML and open up a new post containing a pre-made <img ...> tag linking to the new image.
bzero postimg blogname (image)
e.g.:
bzero postimg foobar my_picture.jpg
This will post 'my_picture.jpg' to the blog called 'foobar'.
Note: You need to have the Python Imaging Library installed for this to work properly (and generate 'width' and 'height' attributes in your HTML).
bzero can check an e-mail account for you and post messages to your blog. You need to tell it about your mail account, and make up a 'secret', which it will use to verify that messages are really coming from you. (Otherwise anybody who knows your e-mail address would be able to post to your blog).
To set this up, run
bzero setup blogname
and edit the server: The hostname of your mail (POP3) server,
e.g. mail.foobar.com. login: Your mail login name, e.g. "phil". password: Your mail password. secret: The aforementioned 'secret' that tells
bzero to post this message to your weblog. Now, to check your mail and make posts out of any messages
that have the secret value in their subject lines:
bzero checkmail blogname
You will need to publish the blog before any messages will
show up there:
bzero send blogname
If you have backed up your weblog in XML format, you can
import the backup into a new bzero weblog. This is useful if
you want to switch blogging packages (moving from Radio to
bzero, for example) or if your hard disk has died and all your
posts are gone. To make the backup in the first place, see 'Making an XML
backup' below, or how
to do it in Radio UserLand if you are importing a Radio
weblog. To import, run: bzero import blogname
url-to-files.xml For example: bzero import foobar
http://www.pycs.net/archetypes/backups/files.xml This will download all the backed-up data and use it to
recreate the ~/.bzero/blogname/data directory. If that
directory already exists, it will be moved out of the way.
(You might want to create a new weblog to experiment with -
importing over the top of an existing blog will work, but may
not be what you were intending). You can archive your weblog in XML format (currently
RSS 2.0):
bzero archive blogname To browse the archive, either use BlogGazer (from Myelin) or
BlogBrowser (from Brent Simmons). You can archive your weblog in a really easy to parse text format too: bzero fsdump blogname path-to-output Warning: this will probably stomp all over anything already in the path-to-output. It will create a hierarchy of directories, sort of like those in the ~/.bzero/blogname/data location, except with a directory rather than a file for each post, and with all the attributes of each post being stored as separate files within that directory. Try it to see what I'm talking about :-) This sort of thing is probably very handy if you want to export data to different blogging tools. I had blosxom in mind when I wrote it. Currently no released search engines support this, but you can send the contents of your blog to an engine I'm working on like so: bzero sendsearch blogname You'll need to have something like the following in the <search engineType="myelin"
rpcUrl="http://searchbox:8080/blogsearch/RPC2"
blogId="0"
login="me@my.com"
password="my.password"
/> If you want to participate in projects like GeoURL, you will want to add
META tags to the HTML header on your blog's index page. You
can do this by putting the extra headers in a file called
~/.bzero/blogname/extraheaders.html. Here's what the GeoURL entry for Second p0st looks
like: <meta name="ICBM"
content="-43.5298,172.6306" /> If you don't want to ping weblogs.com and your community
server when you push your updates to your blog, you can tell
bzero not to do that like this: bzero send blogname noping This will send blog blogname to the server but won't
send any pings. This will speed things up a little. When you create a new blog, a subdirectory of ~/.bzero
(C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\.bzero on Windows) is
created to hold the associated data (posts, rendered HTML,
etc). You can customise various things by editing files in
that directory. To customise your page templates, edit the files in
the ~/.bzero/blogname/templates/ directory. index.py
is your homepage template, and rss.py is your RSS feed
template. Both files are just Python code, so you can
do anything there that you usually can in Python. To customise your blogroll, edit
~/.bzero/blogname/blogroll.py. It is also Python
code, so be careful with what you put in there. If
you follow the existing examples, you should be fine. Note that you are not required to leave in the links
that lead back to bzero and Myelin, but they are
always appreciated ;-) The default post template (with title 'New Post' and
content 'Enter text here') is fairly plain and will
almost certainly not suit your style. If you have a
better idea of what you want to appear by default,
save it as ~/.bzero/blogname/defaultPost.txt and it
will be used instead. bzero doesn't use a database to store post information, but
it does use a dbm file to keep track of which files it
has sent to the community server. If you get odd errors like
this: raise error, "db type could not be determined" Try deleting the directory.dbm file (inside .bzero
somewhere). It doesn't store any critical information, just the
timestamps of the files on the server. As such, deleting it
will trigger a full upstream, so be prepared for the next
bzero send to take a while. Thanks to Doug
for pointing this out. If you get a whole lot of junk ending with a line
looking like:
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: junk after
document element: line 2, column 0 ... then something to do with the communication with
the server is screwing up. To debug this, set the
BZERO_DEBUG environment variable, and bzero will show
you the contents of all XML-RPC messages it sends to
the server. export BZERO_DEBUG=1 If you are talking to a phpStorageSystem server, it is
probably returning PHP errors in the response before
the XML. Contact your server administrator to get it
fixed.Restoring a backed up weblog
Making an XML backup
bzero send blognameWindows
Mac OS X
Making a text backup
Pushing your pages to a search engine
server section of your ~/.bzero/blogname/auth.xml file before you try this, though:Putting metadata in your HTML header
Publishing without pinging
Customisation
Templates
Blogroll
Post template
Troubleshooting
Database errors
anydbm.error: db type could not be determined
Exception exceptions.AttributeError: "Publisher instance has no attribute 'state'" in <bound method r.__del__ of <b0lib.publish.Publisher instance at 0x00AC0A80>> ignoredXML-RPC errors
bzero etcAny questions?