Building My Django Weblog: Part 6.5

All of a sudden, more than a month has passed and I have not added any new entries. I've been working on and off on a markdown extension to handle abbr and acronym tags. So far it simply refuses to work (the code doesn't even seem to get executed). For the curious:

import re, markdown, random

class AcronymExtension (markdown.Extension):
    def __init__ (self, configs) :
        self.config = configs

    def extendMarkdown(self, md, md_globals) :
        self.md = md

        ABBR_RE = re.compile(r'\[(.+?)\]\{([^{]+?)\}')
        ACRONYM_RE = re.compile(r'\[([^\]]*)\]\{\{([^}]+)\}\}')

        md.inlinePatterns.append(AcronymPattern(ABBR_RE, self.config))
       # md.inlinePatterns.append(AcronymPattern(ACRONYM_RE, self.config))

class AcronymPattern (markdown.BasePattern) :
    def __init__ (self, pattern, config) :
        markdown.BasePattern.__init__(self, pattern)
        self.config = config

    def handleMatch(self, m, doc) :
        abbr = doc.createElement('abbr')
        abbr.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(m.group(1)))
        abbr.setAttribute('title', m.group(2))
        return abbr

def makeExtension(configs=None) :
    return AcronymExtension(configs=configs)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

So, in the meanwhile, I'm not able to deliver on my promise to talk more about microformats.

However, if you're astute, you've noticed that the tag cloud on these pages has changed. John Buchanan recently released a distutils-enabled version of django-tagging.

He's implemented both the features I requested, which makes me greatly happy. I've added the first feature to this site already. Now, when you click on a specific user's blog, you will see the tag cloud that pertains to that user only. When you go back out to the main blog page you'll see an aggregate or global tag cloud. A lot of thanks to Mr. Buchanan for his work.

The other thing that this site now has is email. Jay Pfeifer has been helping me set up a lot of the back end of this site. He helped set up apache properly; he's been the signing authority for my SSL certificates; and this week he set up the email back-end. I'll have more to talk about when I do something with that (for now I'm just setting up imap access for my family members). Maybe the django-webmail project can move forward a little bit more.

Sorry to have kept so silent. If you have any feedback on the broken markdown extension code I pasted above, please leave me a comment. I'd love to get that working properly.