I made good use of pyblosxom for many years but its time to move on. Pyblosxom development is no longer very active. Also, its reliance upon file mtimes for entry dates led to old entries popping back up and I had to whack them back down with touch -d. (Pyblosxom’s few date plugins were unappealing for varied reasons.) Finally, when I did get the commenting system to work, I couldn’t trust it without moderation, but I never paid enough attention to accept proper comments.

Hence, I’ve moved to the python static blogger Pelican. I love that it’s static, supports categories, tags, and dates with simple metadata using the semi-standard mmd conventions. (I do miss pyblosxom’s nested categories.) While I’m delighted to delegate commenting stuff to disqus, I’m not happy about using a propietary, javascript based service criticized for its privacy policies. But, I’m willing to give it a try, perhaps it’s better than no comments, which was where I was headed, and I can always export/liberate the comments from disqus should I change my mind.

I wrote a python script pyb2pel.py to migrate both the entries and comments from pyblosxom to pelican. (Comments are incorporated into the entry content as “ported/archived.”) The script is focused on converting entries read by the html entry parser, but it can easily be extended.