Sun, 18 Jun 2006

Planet Yak Shaving

I had a bunch of browser tabs open containing blogs I wanted to add to Planet NZTech so I decided I would do so. Net result: about another 17 or so extra blogs on the roll (About 75 on the roll all up--where did they all come from? :-) ).

As it happens, I pulled about 12 of the new blogs from the Planet WLUG site. I contemplated just subscribing to their feed or requesting the appropriate part of their Planet config.ini file but decided I'd hack up a quick script to generate the configuration information from their OPML file. (My excuse for writing the script was that the first option would presumably lose the individual blogger info and the second option required me to write an email and, you know, didn't give me instant gratification...)

So, anyway, here's opml2ini.py hardcoded filename and all (requires ElementTree)... 

#!/usr/bin/python

# convert OPML file (from Planet) to ini file (for Planet)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from elementtree import ElementTree

    doc = ElementTree.fromstring(open("opml.xml").read())

    for o in doc.getiterator("outline"):
        print "[%s]\nname = %s\n" % (o.attrib['xmlUrl'], o.attrib['text'])

It's been suggested I upgrade the version of Planet I'm running, so I thought I'd see how much hassle it'd be. Unfortunately Planet still doesn't have an official 1.0 release yet. I thought I'd try the nightlies which many people seem to run but moved my old install out of the way first as I'd read of issues with cache files and old templates and so forth...

Unfortunately--after configuring the new install--on execution I encountered this lovely message: 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "planet/planet.py", line 23, in ?
    import planet
  File "/<...>/planet/__init__.py", line 35, in ?
    import dbhash
  File "/<...>/lib/python2.3/dbhash.py", line 5, in ?
    import bsddb
  File "/<...>/lib/python2.3/bsddb/__init__.py", line 40, in ?
    import _bsddb
ImportError: No module named _bsddb
Apparently the error is a result of a "broken" Python install on the FreeBSD server on which I'm running all of this. As I don't have root access to the host the Planet has been reverted to the previous version for now.

Posted at: 06:55 | category: / | Comments ()