jerakeen.org

I tend to reimplement the CMS that drives jerakeen.org more often than I add content to it, but the current Django based incarnation seems to have decent sticking power. A lot of this is Django’s magic admin interface middleware. When I add, say, a tagging engine to the site, I only need to worry about the object model and presenting it on the site itself. All the boring and much harder to write admin pages to add and remove tags just write themselves. But the other reason I’m staying with it is that I’ve now added so many features to it (because it’s easy!) that a re-write in another language would be a huge amount of effort.

This weekend, for instance, I’ve added an implementation of the metaweblog API to the site, using the excellent code on allyourpixel as a base. The main source of pain is the persistent weirdness of implementing the Movable Type extensions to the metaweblog extensions to the Blogger XMLRPC API. How can you call something a metaweblog API and not allow for post excerpts, for instance? So annoying.

While implementing it, I found the TextPattern API reference to be far more useful than the official spec, mostly because it covers everything up to the Movable Type extensions, which you need if you want to edit page excerpts. The other problem I encountered was that Ecto won’t talk to an endpoint over HTTPS with a self-signed certificate unless the SSL cert is in the local machine X509 database. The way it fails is incredibly unhelpful and annoying, too. The simplest way to fix it (assuming a recent macos) is to visit the endpoint in Safari. It’ll complain about the certificate - click the ‘always trust this site’ box, and it’ll stop.