myelin: bzero

VERSION 0.19

bzero is a blogging tool. Yes, yet another one ;)

• For Unix and Windows.
• 100% pure Python.
• Supports international character sets (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 formats).
• Compatible with UserLand RCS as well as open-source PyCS servers.

Out of the box, it:

• Works with Weblogs.Com.
• Generates an RSS XML feed for each blog.

You can see all these features in action on Second p0st, a bzero weblog.

Warning

This is a public beta. Expect things to break a bit. It's not quite done. Send me an e-mail when you try it out and tell me if it worked. If it fails to install, please tell me. Things like that need fixing.

That said, most things work fine. It's never lost a post for me!

Usage

First: Read the README! It's much more detailed. For a brief intro, read on:

Installation

Download the code for Python 2.2, Python 2.3 or Python 2.4, untar somewhere and run ./install in the newly-created directory:

• wget http://www.myelin.co.nz/bzero/bzero-0.19.tar.gz
• tar -vzxf bzero-0.19.tar.gz
• cd bzero-0.19
• ./install

Starting a new blog

Type:

• bzero new (blogname) (email address) (password)

Where:

• (blogname) is a short 'tag' to describe your blog. I use 'p0st' for Second p0st.
• (email address) is your e-mail address. Make sure you get this right, otherwise you will have trouble getting your password reset in an emergency.
• (password) is the aforementioned password. It can have any chars you like in it, and can be as long as you like. Remember that you're running this on the command line though, so if you say something like '*' you may get unexpected results.

This will make you a new blog. Now edit it and give it a decent name:

• bzero setup (blogname)

Edit the author and so on. When you want to post:

• bzero post (blogname)

This will open your favourite editor with a blank entry. Edit it and:

• bzero send (blogname)

This will send it to the server.

Notes

Installing somewhere other than /usr/lib/bzero

If you want to install bzero somewhere other than /usr/lib/bzero, you'll need to set the BZERO_LIB environment variable to tell it where its files are. For example, if you have unpacked the tarball into the directory /home/foo/bzero-0.19, you can get it to run with:

• export BZERO_LIB=/home/foo/bzero-0.19

Changing the default editor

Whenever bzero needs to edit something, it will bring up your default editor. First it checks the EDITOR environment variable, then the VISUAL one, and if neither of those are set it will use /etc/alternatives/editor, or notepad.exe on Windows. If you want to get it to use a new editor, either make a symlink to it:

• ln -s /path/to/your/favourite/editor /etc/alternatives/editor

Or set your EDITOR variable:

• export EDITOR=/path/to/my/favourite/editor

On Windows:

• set EDITOR="c:\Program Files\MyEditor\Editor.exe"

Enjoy!

Development version

Here is the README for the development version.

You can probably download the latest in-development code here (if there is any): Windows/Python2.2 | Windows/Python2.4 | UNIX/Python2.2 | UNIX/Python2.3 | UNIX/Python2.4