Python Liberation Front

Awaretek

A bit about the sections on this web site:

Python: The Python Learning Foundation is a resource for those learning Python, and includes links to more than 75 online Tutorials, more than 25 Book Reviews written by myself, output from a web spider finding articles about Python that is updated daily, and much more.

Baha'i: "Why I am a Baha'i" is an online book written by myself, about my search for a religion that is in accord with science, logic, and reason. The Baha'i Faith teaches that all the Prophets and Founders of the major religions come from the same source and teach the same basic, underlying truth, which is updated periodically to the benefit of the times in which the Prophet appears.

Poetry: Emotionally Yours is a selection of poems written by me over a 35 year period. Whew.

Blog: Merlin's Musings are my personal blog.

Tech News: Awaretek Tech News is updated every 15 minutes by a web spider.

Philosophy: Farnham's Freehold is a series of essays about my philosophy of liberty focusing on open source software, economics, business, and government.

Firedrop2: First Impressions

My impressions of Firedrop, after only a few days of using it, are mostly very favorable. I am running Firedrop on my dual 867 MHz. PowerMac desktop at home. The only two features of Firedrop that don't quite work right yet on Mac OS X are both gui-related; the "Preview" feature and the "Upload" feature. Firedrop provides a very nice GUI front end, allowing me to open a weblog folder, enter a new post for my blog, save the post, and build a revised weblog folder incorporating not only the new post, but also new archives, and updating the database containing all the other attributes of the new post. "Preview" is a button that lets you view the new post in the Gui window pane; "Upload" automatically uploads your new post and archive files to your web site. I really don't need Preview, I can view my new post just fine in a browser, and for now, really, I don't need to do that, since my posts are text only. The upload issue is no doubt a problem with the way Python on the Mac handles ftp, since I have had that problem before. Preview may be a problem with the wxPython implementation, I don't know.

In order to use Firedrop, you must first install Python, then wxPython, then WAX, Hans Nowak's GUI toolkit that sits atop wxPython. wxPython itself sits atop wxWindows. My experience with wxPython is good; it is truly cross platform and I have installed and used it on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It looks and feels like native code on all three environments. Installation is mostly easy, although I did originally have some problems with dependencies on the Mac; but those are easier now that Mac OS X 10.3, Panther, is out, at least in my experience. My advice is this; just be sure to take your time and follow the instructions precisely, step by step, in order to install wxPython. The version number of each dependency is crucial.

Firedrop's wxPython GUI looks good, functions crisply and quickly, and is user-friendly. Firedrop's blog capabilities include categories to sort your posts by, archives by date , and other features I have not yet explored. You can enter your new posts in plain text, or use Hans' Sextile module, which makes blogging even simpler by allowing one to enter simple text that is converted to HTML automatically. There is a gentle learning curve to Sextile but its pretty simple, even for me. There is also a Macro capability that allows you to define your own acronyms and typing shortcuts, like for url's that you use frequently.

And, of course, the real appeal of Firedrop is that it is scriptable in Python, so I can improve and customize it as I go. Well, I'm really happy with Firedrop so far. I'll enter updates on how I'm doing with it on this blog from time to time as the year progresses.

Cheers, Ron Stephens

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