Seth Nickell

Its been a long time coming, but we’re happy to announce a standard site-wide mechanism for hosting your blog on gnome.org. We’re using the excellent NewsBruiser blog software. blogs.gnome.org comes in three delicious flavors, with more to come. You can also design your own template and CSS rather than using one of our stock themes.

Autumn
Black and White
Blue and Green

If you’re currently hosting your blog on gnome.org using software installed in your user account (such as pyblosxom), we would strongly encourage you to move your blog over. Its very easy to import an existing blog, and it will reduce the opportunities for gnome.org to be craxzor3d.

1. Who can get one? Anyone with a GNOME cvs account can request a blog.
2. Why does blogs.gnome.org redirect to planet.gnome.org? Individual’s blogs can be found at http://blogs.gnome.org/username . We decided not to provide an aggregator for blogs.gnome.org blogs since its pretty much an arbitrary set (unlike planet gnome which in theory aggregates the most interesting gnome related blogs).
3. _______ doesn’t work Please e-mail seth@gnome.org and jrb@redhat.com or talk to us on IRC.
4. Why’d you use NewsBruiser?

   NewsBruiser is a bit of a dark horse, but it matched our needs most closely:

   • Supports multi-user site installs
   • Is straightforward and focused on letting people write and read blog entries
   • Makes it very easy to import entries from an existing blog (it has a few different types of importer, including a bloxsom importer, but we’ve found the RSS importer works best and should work with the most blogs)
   • Has a reasonable web-based per user setting system
   • Can be arbitrarily themed / templated by users, but also allows for stock site-wide themes
   • Has a web form for posting entries
   • Supports MetaWeblog for posting entries using tools like gnome blog
   • Is written in a language we can reasonably extend and maintain ourselves, if necessary (Python)
   • Has a helpful and responsive maintainer
   • Did not require per-user SQL accounts (NB doesn’t use SQL at all)
   • Stores blogs in a simple format so we aren’t necessarily tied to the software, say, 4 years down the road (NB also allows users to download all their entries as a tarball w/o sysadmin intervention, a nice bonus)

   Actually, if you look through this list its not a particularly exotic list of features, and its really a shame that given how much blog software has been written NewsBruiser is the only one (we could find) that supports these features.

Getting a blogs.gnome.org account

1. In the next week or so, just pester either jrb or I on IRC (or by e-mail, though I personally prefer IRC). We’ll need your gnome.org username. Long term, people can email accounts@gnome.org instead. Anyone with a CVS account can request a blog.
2. Visit http://blogs.gnome.org/yourusername and login using the password we provide to you.
3. Click import to import from an existing blog (if you have one). We’ve found the RSS importer to work best.
4. Click configure (should be one of the links replacing the login box after you’ve logged in).
5. Setup your blog information on the first page. We recommend you use your name for the “Notebook Title” so that its easy for people to tell who’s blog they’re reading. Click the submit button at the bottom of the page when you’re done.
6. You can change the theme (or define your own theme/template using the “no theme” option) from the “Look and Feel” configuration page.