midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

I found it surprising that a good number of python programmer’s blogs aren’t written using python - isn’t that like GM employees driving Toyota cars?

I came across the Python Programmer Weblogs page on the lowlife.jp wiki recently. I’m thinking of changing my blog software (more on that in a bit), and since I do some development in python, why not essentially ask other python developers what they use for blogging software, by scanning the list of blogs? A couple of hours later….

Firstly, a disclaimer: I couldn’t actually determine what software was used in all cases. In some cases the blogger proudly mentioned the software used, but in others I had to View Source and snoop around looking for clues (a ‘wp’ folder is a dead give-away of a wordpress installation, for instance). Even then, in many cases I couldn’t readily tell whether what was being used was a product or a home-brew app, so I had to lump them all together. Now, on to the results.

What does this all mean? Certainly I was surprised by the number of python developers using a PHP-based blog software package. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that PHP blogging tools have been around longer, and are more mature generally, than Python software tools. Personally I’m using Wordpress because it was the best (for me) tool that was available a couple of years ago when I was looking (I also tried Movable Type, Typepad, Plone, and Coreblog and a couple of others at the time).

Once you get a body of articles written using one tool, it may be inconvenient, difficult, or even impossible to get the articles transferred to another tool should you decide to switch. So users may have a tendency to stick with what they’ve got, even if something better comes along.

As for the number of developers using web-based blogging tools like blogger.com, advogato.com, or artima.com, perhaps they’re motivated by a desire to participate in a community rather than install standalone software. Which brings up another reason: not everyone has access to a server space where they can install a standalone blogging software package, particularly one written in python. I’ve looked around, and while many web hosting companies provide perl and PHP, not many provide python. Two notable exceptions are python-hosting.com and f2o.org.

How do the blog tools used by python developers differ from those used by the general public? One estimate of market share is provided by blogcensus.net, but I find it suspect because wordpress doesn’t appear anywhere on the list in spite of its apparent popularity. A more thorough study was done by elise.com in August 2004; in this study, wordpress ranks more highly (not that this makes the study results right!).

At the end of the day, I’m not much further ahead in deciding whether it’s worth switching from Wordpress to a Python-based blogging tool! Any suggestions or comments? At the moment, I’m considering frog, which is of course written in Python, and is enjoying ongoing and active development. I’m using it at work on a test basis.