PyDS

Rand Anderson's (update: sorry about the misspelling!) previously-mentioned blog post brought his Executable Abstractions weblog to my attention, and I noticed something interesting about it; namely, that while it was obviously a generated weblog it didn't match the profiles of any of the many blogging systems I am already familiar with.

A little digging on the homepage led me to PyDS, which is basically Radio Userland in Python. (Not Frontier; the aspects that Radio Userland added to Frontier, the News Aggregator, the Weblog, Tools, nice Preferences screen, etc.)

Intrigued, I emerge'd it onto my Gentoo system. As I mentioned recently, the only full-time Windows XP machine left in the house is running Radio Userland, and I've been looking for a way off. I thought I'd eventually build one about a year from now based on Iron Lute, but it turns out that PyDS is more then capable of handling what I used Radio Userland for, so I decided to jump sooner rather then later.

(The benefits are that there are now two computers that used to be on 24/7, the Radio Userland computer and a computer that was providing secure access to it remotely; I'm almost afraid to find out how that was impacting my power bill...)

I've completed that transition. What you're reading is no longer Radio Userland generated, it is PyDS generated. I've also transitioned away from /irights to /iri; with the help of some mod_rewrite rules in Apache you should not notice any differences. (I've special-cased /irights/rss.xml to point directly at the correct RSS file without a redirect, in case your aggregator might be lost by the redirect.)

So far I am pleased; there's a few changes I want to make and submit patches for, but by and large it's a very, very solid 0.7.0 release. I'll be posting a review later on, bearing in mind that it's a 0.7.0 product and doesn't cost anything.

Please e-mail me if you experience any problems with this site that may be related to this switchover; that includes broken links (all links to old /irights URLs should still work) and everything else, except broken anchors (the anchors in the HTML have changed but that shouldn't affect very many people).