Python Community Server: Development

I just checked in some changes to PyCS, to do with monitoring how much space people are using. The users page now lets you sort by disk space used, so you can figure out which users are using the most. It looks like nobody on pycs.net is using too much, so I'm not worried. Anything less than 50 MB is fine, I think.

I also think I cracked the problem that was causing pycs.net to hang. It looks like that happens when you stop the server process, then restart it, but without waiting for it to die properly. I've changed my stop script to keep sending it KILL signals until it's really gone, and the server hasn't hung since.

It looks like the referrer pages are taking a little while to generate, as well, so search engines hitting them could be causing trouble. Let's see how this goes ...

Mail was broken -- my mailer wasn't relaying properly. So anyone who's been having trouble with mail (via mailto.py) not being delivered, you should find that it works now.

Georg has hacked up an XML-RPC API for user-supplied access restrictions in PyCS. This lets users restrict access to bits of their blogs. This is quite a big deal as it's something no other community server does.

OK, we're almost there. Posting this to make sure pycs.net is still stable, with the new changes.

Here's my pycs-devel mailing list post on the subject.

More on this later.

Adam's Complete Lack Of Weblog
Blog of Talmage

The Python library that strips unwanted tags out of dodgy HTML, that is ...

It's available from Chris Withers' zope.org page.

I've been using a pretty old version (after Georg told me about it) for a bit now, but it seems to have trouble with ' (apostrophe) - it turns ' into &apos instead of leaving it alone. Let's see if this has been fixed ...

Update - it seems that ' doesn't actually exist (check it yourself) in HTML, so it's entirely reasonable that stripogram should ignore it. I guess it's an XML thing then?

So much for using sgmllib for parsing XML.

Loads of new users on pycs.net this week. Does anyone want a better URL?

usernum 76: Lateral Opinion
usernum 77: Rabid Ramblings ][
usernum 78: Brainsplit
usernum 79: Michael Beaulieu's Radio Weblog

Thanks to Georg, you can now see a cute colourful display of all the search terms people used to get to this blog.

See also: Georg's mailing list post and what inspired him to do it.

Jim Jones has switched from using the UserLand comment server over to the PyCS one (here's how to do it).

Currently, radiocomments.userland.com is quite overloaded. If you're having problems with your blog loading slowly because the comment count script is taking ages to fetch, feel free to use pycs.net instead. It'll speed up your page load times, and take some of the load off the UserLand server, which should help them out a bit.

This is probably better if you've just started a blog, though, as your old comments will be stranded on radiocomments.userland.com if you have any ...

Georg Bauer has implemented full comment RSS feeds in PyCS.

This means that users on PyCS servers (once they're updated) won't need to use my comment monitor (which generates RSS comment feeds for RCS users). Nice. Time to update pycs.net ...

Update: Don't use this if you have a huge number of comments, as it will generate a very big RSS file. Currently it gives you everything in there rather than the last 10 or 15 (this is by design -- it's so you never miss a comment, even under heavy flooding). If we hack it to generate Last-Modified and understand If-Modified-Since, it should be fine though.