João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Sorry about that, it took me a while to realize that the Chora installation was set to the old webroot path.

Works fine now.

Jan-Willem Hiddink has an interesting post about the possibility of hacking a new Papercut storage module to handle weblog entries.

Jan: that is indeed possible. Bill Seitz also had some interesting thoughts on this, which can be summarized in the following:

– Each weblog will become a newsgroup and each weblog post will be a newsgroup message (maybe comments could become replies to the post?)
– Weblog readers and writers may use papercut as their replication mechanism. Everyone will run papercut locally and then connect to ‘localhost’ using Outlook Express or whatever to either read weblog entries and post new weblog entries (or even comments to existing weblog entries)
– They would need some way to add a weblog papercut host/port to their subscription list (changing settings.py or a local database in the process)

I took a few hours to write down what would need to be developed for this to happen:

– Add support for the IHAVE command in Papercut
– Need a client side tool to help people add weblog servers to their subscription list
– New storage module to store subscriptions/weblog entries locally (maybe SQLite?)
– Need a new authentication mechanism to allow weblog authors to post a new ‘thread’ (or weblog entry) in their newsgroups and to prevent other people from doing the same

Anyway, aside from these requirements a client side tool could be written using Fredrik Lundh’s effbot platform (or just plain TKinter) to make it easier to start/stop the service on Windows, for instance.

A new version of Papercut is available for download. Papercut is a news server written in Python. Its main objective is to integrate existing web based message board software (Phorum is one of the supported ones) with an Usenet front-end. However, its extensibility enables developers to write their own containers for the storage of the Usenet articles (messages). That means that the code is extensible enough that _you_ could write new containers to integrate the news server with other web message board projects or even other ways to store the messages.

I love working on this project – the possibilities for novel uses of it are really endless. It even looks like someone else might want to use the mbox integration :)