Adding in more stuff

It's mostly what I am working on atm for the blog. After using blogofile for a few days now I've really gotten accustomed to writing up new things for it. It is only python after all. So that helps. My newest idea was to have a listing of my github projects in the sidebar.

Seems simple enough

Found a good api in python for this. There was one that used javascript that would have also done the job, but I decided this could be slow and updated when the site was built, instead of needing to be updated real time.

After installing the github2 module, I got right to it and started making a controller for the widget. And I ended up with something like this:

import logging

from blogofile.cache import bf
github = bf.config.controllers.github

from github2.client import Github
github_api = Github()

config = {
    "name": "Github",
    "description": "Makes a nice github project listing for the sidebar",
    "priority": 90.0,
    }

def get_list(user):
    """
    Each item in the list has:
    name, url, description, forks, watchers, homepage, open_issues
    """
    return [g for g in github_api.repos.list(user) if not g.fork]


def run():
    github.logger = logging.getLogger(config['name'])
    github.repo_list = get_list(github.user)

#### github projects ####
controllers.github.enabled = True
github = controllers.github
github.user = "goosemo"

<div class="sidebar_item">
<h3>Github Projects</h3>
<ul>
% for project in bf.config.controllers.github.repo_list:
    <li><a href="${project.url}" title="${project.name}">
    ${project.name}</a>&nbsp;${project.description}</li>
    <br/>
% endfor
</ul>
</div>
<br />

I did run into an issue

After getting this all down the site was acting strange. The frontage had the listing of my git repos just as it was supposed to be. But I found that on every other page the github section was blank.

After tweaking and getting a bit frustrated, I read the blogofile code a bit more for the controller sections, and got the idea to up the priority from 70 to 90.

This did the trick, and I figure it was because the permalinks and other page creation work was being done before the github.repo_list could be populated.

Thoughts so far

Overall the process from idea to working in blogofile is straightforward, since it's nothing new in form of coding. Mako and python go well together.

Now I just need to get down a coherent way to publish these little bits I keep adding, and to also make them completely configurable via the _config.py and isolated into their own units so that installation/use is a simple procedure.