Tag Archives: Google App Engine

Writing Files to GAE Blobstore

FileSystem API was introduced in AppEngine last year. A great feature. I tried using it more than a couple of times and ended up with one problem or the other. Some of the notable issues include:

  • What should be the filename during create and save? The name given during create was only name-part and cannot be used during read. Read must use fullpath.
  • If you use fullpath, you cannot use it to delete the file.

After a bunch of experiments, I concluded that it is best to use BlobKey.

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Processing Shortcodes in a post in Minow

Minow with Shortcode processing

Minow can now process short-codes. Well, it started doing so almost a month back… just that I never got time to update my blog.

As of now, the short-code processor has been encapsulated in a simple interface that does the processing of a short-code with attributes. At http://minow-web.appspot.com/, you may notice YouTube videos embedded in the posts. They are not hard-coded HTML but processed using the YouTube short-code processor.

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Update on Minow Progress

Update on Minow Progress - A Closeup

Minow (Minow Is Not WordPress) Engine can now read data from data-store. It’s not generic enough though – right now hard-coded to Google App Engine, but nevertheless.

Here’s what I’ve done since last push:

  • Model for localized content is ready
  • Basic logic to retrieve content for a given locale (not parent, no fallback) is ready. For example, if the language is “hi_IN” (Hindi-India), it – as of now – can get you the content for “hi” and/or fallback to “en_US” / “en”.
    As of now, the language is a query-parameter… will enhance to parse “accept-languages” header with priority (q=0.3 etc)
  • Nest theme has been updated to use the “real” data
  • Implementation exists to lazy load data from the store – don’t load the posts until they’re really required. A lot of WordPress templates do not have blog on their landing page
  • And of course, a piece of code generate sample data 😉

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WordPress on Google App Engine

Minow is not Wordpress - Wordpress on Google App Engine

I think this is a dream for almost every blogger… well, at least my and at least hundreds of thousands of others.

Most of the other results that you’ll find on search engines relating to WordPress and Google App Engine are about running WordPress on GAE/J by using Caucho Quercus – a bridge between PHP and Java. However, if running / simulating PHP on Java was that easy, PHP on GAE would not have been most starred issue.

And that made me think… how about creating, may be, yet another blog engine for GAE. And what better than taking clues from WordPress.

So, that gave birth of Minow, acronym for Minow Is Not WordPress. Yes, it’s a recursive acronym – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym for what I mean.

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