A few months back, when I was on a Launchpad Bugs sprint in Vilnius, Tom and Gavin asked me whether I'd thought about open-sourcing the engine that runs grahambinns.com. My answer then was that I'd thought about it but never done it because:

1. It wasn't very good
2. The code had a lot of grahambinns.com-specific code in it
3. It wasn't very good.

It's still not very good, but I've removed all the grahambinns.com specifics and now I'm reasonably happy to announce (like the father of a slightly ill-coordinated child) Frabjous version 0.1, "Not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable", is now available for download under the GPLv3 at launchpad.net.

Some questions and answers:

• Q: Why 'Frabjous'?
  A: Because I was reading Jabberwocky at the time I was trying to think up a name.
• Q: Should I replace my Wordpress installation with Frabjous?
  A: Emphatically no, unless you really, really want to. Frabjous is, for all that I've removed a lot of the me-specific code, pretty awkward to adminster just yet (well, I think it is). Wordpress is as good as it is because it's very mature; Frabjous isn't.
• Q: Do you want Frabjous to be a Wordpress killer?
  A: Not really. I want it to be better than it is at the moment and I'd like people to use it, but Wordpress is a fantastic piece of software and people will doubtless find it easier to use and set up than Frabjous for quite a while.
• Q: That being the case, why do you use Frabjous rather than Wordpress?
  A: I originally wrote what would become Frabjous because I wanted to learn Django. I also had a cordial dislike for PHP after years of working in it and wanted never to have to run it on a server of mine ever again. So far, I'm succeeding.

So, please go and try it out. You can grab the trunk from Launchpad using bzr branch lp:frabjous; please feel free to have a look at the code, hack on it and file bugs. Patches welcome, branches even better.

For the record, I have no illusions that anyone other than me will ever use this code, especially with so many other blogging and site management platforms available. However, you can always treat it as a learning exercise, and that's fine too.

Aegisub.net has a funny but pointless comparison between programming languages and religions, mapping C to Judaism, Haskell to Taoism, Lisp to Zen Buddhism and so on. It has the following to say about Python:

Python would be Humanism: It's simple, unrestrictive, and all you need to follow it is common sense. Many of the followers claim to feel relieved from all the burden imposed by other languages, and that they have rediscovered the joy of programming. There are some who say that it is a form of pseudo-code.

Which rather tickled me. I knew there was a reason I liked it.

Here:

I’d use these [tips on using Python with vim] if I wasn’t still scarred from the time vim encrypted my file instead of saving it because I had caps lock on by mistake.

Bless.

Wow.

Once again, I'm late in getting on a particular train of thought. That's not unusual, true, but I should have been slightly quicker about it this time round because a) it's something in which I'm really, really interested and b) one of my friends, whose blog I read, posted about it and I didn't actually pay that much attention until a lot of other people had jumped up and down, commenting on how fantastic this particular thing is.

So, in case you've been living under a particular sort of rock (i.e. the one that stops you finding out about new OSS projects, assuming you're interested in that ) here's the not-exactly-a-scoop.

You may have heard of a project called WriteRoom, a full-screen text editor for the Mac which costs, currently, $24.95. Now, I've been using a cross-platform WriteRoom clone, JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and is pretty much closed-source AFAICT, for quite a while. JDarkRoom has issues - beyond the two fairly major ones of being written in Java and been free as in beer but not as in speech (though that's not a reason not to use it). On Ubuntu it's pretty clunky, slow, and doesn't work at all unless you go and install the Sun JRE rather than using the one that ships with Ubuntu by default.

Anyway, as has been pointed out pretty much the OSS world over by now, there's now a Python (always dear to my heart) clone of WriteRoom, PyRoom. It seems to have found a lot of traction over the last week or so, because although it didn't work terribly well the first time that I tried it it's now perfectly useable - more so than JDarkRoom by far (I can't speak for WriteRoom, of course). It even does multi-buffer editing, which means that I can have this blog entry, and another one that I've been writing since Friday, open at the same time and happily switch between the two (this may sound like a really obvious feature, but you'd be surprised how much more efficient it makes me).

Now, don't get me wrong, I still love my vim, and there's no way in hell that I'll be using PyRoom for much besides blogging and writing for the forseeable future - why would I want to? But in terms of allowing me to actually concentrate on writing and stopping me from procrastinating it's fantastic, and it doesn't bug me in the same undefinable way as JDarkRoom does.

So give it a shot, if you're into that sort of thing. You can grab it from Launchpad http://launchpad.net/pyroom. I think you'll find it well worth it.

In other bloody annoying news, my Flickr import script appears to keep breaking my site somehow, to the point where I have to restart Apache to fix it. This is decidedly irksome. 

Today's xkcd strip, Python, gets it right once again:

Incidentally (he says), I met xkcd, a.k.a. Randall Munroe, when I was in the States. He's a nice bloke.