queertopia

Avatar

entertainment, travel and community.

Welcome to Bloog

This is the default root page for Bloog, a simple RESTful blog/homepage on Google AppEngine, and shows what it looks like out of the box with no posts or pages. You can see a Bloog with data here or what Bloog likes like out of the box.

Bloog is open sourced under the MIT License. Source code can be found on the GitHub Bloog repository. Git allows you to easily customize the base app while later merging changes from the main repository (see here).

If you are old school and prefer a tarball of code, click here.

Bloog includes the following features:

  • A resource-oriented architecture, as described in the great book RESTful Web Services
  • A Drupal converter/uploader that queries a local MySQL database and uploads the data to a Bloog through REST calls.
  • A datastore deletion utility that can clear out your entities in your Bloog's datastore.
  • Arbitrary URL aliases, which can be created by the drupal uploader, that provide redirection from legacy urls. There's also a programmatic aliasing function that can take a regex like 'node/(.*)' and map it to legacy IDs stored with the blog entries. (http://foo.com/node/4 is a typical Drupal url.)
  • A Yahoo UI AJAX front-end for posting and managing entries in a RESTful way.
  • Easy code syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages.
  • Sanitization of incoming HTML via Beautiful Soup parsing.
  • Some modularization of look-and-feel so you can more easily modify the theme without yanking too much code apart (I hope).
  • Dynamic per-article sidebars. (in progress)

From an AppEngine developer's perspective, you may find the source code a reasonable starting framework on which you can build your own application. Points of coding interest include:

  • RESTful design using webapp. Accepts http verbs via overloaded POSTs using _method or X-HTTP-Method-Override headers. Simple urls provide a uniform interface with standard verbs.
  • Convention-over-configuration in organizing controller and view files.
  • Authorization using python decorators and built-in Google authentication.
  • Caching using the memcached API and also some timing caching using global variables.
  • JSON serialization for db.Model.
  • Sharded counters to decrease write contentions.
  • Integrated python shell using one of Google's example apps. This provides a command-line console even when running on Google's App Engine cloud.
  • Serialization of a python object into a datastore blob.
  • An example of full-text searching using an extended version of the appengine.ext.search module. Extensions include ways of limiting indexed properties.

If your login has administrative permission for this Bloog, you can add articles after login.

Gay marriage throughout New England by 2012?

(Boston, Massachusetts) The Boston-based group that won equal marriage rights in Massachusetts and Connecticut said Tuesday it intends to fight for gay marriage rights in the other four New England states and predicted success by 2012. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders announced the campaign on the fifth anniversary of the ...

Syracuse murder victim now identified as transgendered

(Syracuse, New York) The weekend victim of a brazen murder in Syracuse, N.Y., was transgendered, family and friends now tell area media outlets. Police originally had identified the victim as Moses Cannon, 20, and gay. Family members, however, now say Cannon went by the name Latiesha Green and was in the ...

Report from California: Meeting the (gay marriage) opposition

I didn't go out on Friday night; I spent most of it fretting over my sign for Saturday's Join the Impact march. I wish I were good at craft projects, but years of attempts have indicated that I should maybe stick to verbal skills. Still, any good cause is worth a ...

Proposed Chicago gay school retooled

(Chicago, Illinois) A proposed high school for LGBT students under intense criticism has been retooled in a bid to win approval. The Chicago Board of Education put off voting on the Social Justice High SchoolPride Campus last month, following criticism by conservative religious groups that it was catering to "a special ...

Florida anti-gay amendment ratified

(Tallahassee, Florida) Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning has formally ratified results of Florida's general election, including Amendment 2, which limits marriage to opposite-sex couples and bans civil unions. But the final figures released by Browning show that the measure passed with less than a two percent plurality. The official count was ...

Study illustrates need for LGBT anti-discrimination laws

(Los Angeles, California) A study released Tuesday by a University of California - Los Angeles think tank has found workplace discrimination against LGBT employees is as widespread as that against women and visible minorities. Currently,20 states and the District of Columbia prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation;13 of ...

Troy 216: Swimsuit shoot

Ruby-Sachs: Mormons the victims of bigotry?

A story ran in the LA Times yesterday that detailed the efforts of gay rights activists to vilify the Mormon Church. Since the push by Mormon organizations in partnership with many evangelical groups to bolster the Yes on 8 campaign, the Mormon church has been receiving hate mail, faced protests and ...
Powered by Google App Engine
Post Editor




Separate tags with commas