How to add Markdown to your PyBlosxom Blog.

Hopefully this all just works. Include A&B, and 4 < 5.

Headers

Smaller headers

Blockquotes.

• Lists
• of

• things

  Blocks of python code could be here.

etc, etc.

Okay, so now that I’ve determined that it works, here’s how I did it: I added a new entry parser, called pymarkdown.py, to my plugins directory. The content of the code looks like this:

FILE_EXT = 'md'

__version__ = 'pymarkdown 0.1'
__author__ = 'Blake Winton <bwinton+python@latte.ca>'

import markdown

try:
    from Pyblosxom import tools
except ImportError:
    pass

def cb_entryparser(entryparsingdict):
       """
       Register self as markdown file handler
       """
       entryparsingdict[FILE_EXT] = parse
       return entryparsingdict

def parse(filename, request):
    """
    We just read everything off the file here, using the filename as
    title
    """
    entrydata = {}

    f = open(filename, "r")
    lines = f.readlines()
    f.close()

    # strip off the first line and use that as the title.
    title = lines.pop(0).strip()
    entrydata['title'] = title

    # absorb meta data lines which begin with a # and consist
    # of a name and a value
    while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
        meta = lines.pop(0)
        meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
        meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
        entrydata[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

    # join the rest of the lines as the story
    story = ''.join(lines)
    story = markdown.markdown( story )
    entrydata['body'] = story

    return entrydata

And you’re done.

I guess you might be wondering why I would bother doing that, since both Amy and I are obviously comfortable writing straight HTML. Well, DrProject is switching from a custom-built Wiki-ish-syntax parser to a third-party Markdown parser, and I figured this would give me a bit of a headstart on getting used to the new syntax, and also give me a bit of a playground for testing out new features that I might want to add.