About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 67591 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Random crufty open source release of the day

Last year a client asked for help moving his website to a new host from XO.com. The tricky part was that his 200 pages of content were locked into an obsolescent proprietary tool called "Site Builder" that offered no exporting options. The file format was a flatfile that looked like this:

#Page-Type "html"
#UID "1000"
#Access-PublicRead "on"
#Access-PublicWrite "off"
#Page-Links-Style "links_outline.nhtml"
#addbrs "off"
#hidenav "off"
#HTML ...

The file structure went like this: a parent directory named nss-objects; child directories bearing page names (or slugs, really); and inside each, an empty directory named !data and a text file named !object with the page content as described above. Weird. (I suppose every proprietary one-off system is weird in its own way, so there's nothing to be gained from dwelling on the specifics, but at least including them in the post raises the chances that somebody who actually needs this thing and searches for it will find it.)

I've since handed the job and the code off to someone else, and decided to release the script. It's fairly simple, just a couple hundred lines of Python. Since I wrote it for my own use on my Mac, it uses EasyDialogs; if you're on Windows, you can try the Windows port, and otherwise you're on your own (I'd just convert the EasyDialogs calls to output text in the shell).

You feed the script your nss-objects directory, and it does the rest. It can output either a pile of HTML pages (based on a simple template inside the script), or SQL code for ingesting into your favorite relational database.

I'd love to hear from anyone who ends up using this -- it's incredibly obscure, but if you need it, you really need it.

Source: sitebuilder-extract.py

Saturday, April 15th, 2006
python + tips + web development