Blogging with Sphinx

Excruciatingly Boring Navel-Gazing

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with this blog. It went from being on WordPress to being a static-HTML wget dump of a WordPress blog and stayed that way for a couple years.

Since I don’t take my blog too seriously, and since I’ve already been writing blog posts in reStructuredText for a few years now (using a WordPress plugin), and since I’ve already been documenting my Python code using the hair-raisingly cool Sphinx it seemed natural to also want to use Sphinx for my blog; sort of a less special-purpose Blogofile.

If you’re thinking “WTF?” you may want to move on as I’m not trying to sell anything here.

Helpful Blog Machinery

Blogs need three things: commenting, tags, and feeds.

Commenting

I will bolt on commenting, maybe Disqus, in the near future.

Feeds

Sphinx doesn’t generate RSS so I rolled my own as a Sphinx extension (source).

Update: 2011–01–03

It now sorts by most recent entries and takes a few configuration options such as not outputting entries older than a certain date or only outputting a maximum number of entries.

Other Crap

I like to entertain my inner-OCD by crafting dotfiles and as such, I talk about them a lot on my blog. I wanted a quick way to link to one of my dotfiles, wherever it may be hosted, so I wrote a reStructuredText role to do so. Something like the following will generate the right link to a specific file, of a specific revision, and a specific line in my BitBucket repo:

See `line 42 of my ~/barrc
<https://github.com/whiteinge/dotfiles/blob/b1e8bfc81b0a/.barrc#L42>`_.

If I switch to some other provider or self-host, I simply update the URL in my configuration file.

The Source

This is a work in progress as I’ve only just launched the site. If you’re interested, you can see the actual reStructuredText source for any of these posts by clicking the ‘View Source’ link in the sidebar and you can see the entire source for this blog at BitBucket.