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November 16, 2005

I HEART MTSEND.PY

I really, really heart Scott Yang's mtsend.py. It is quite simply the best thing man has invented since some guy with a loaf of bread and a great big knife said "hey, now here's an idea...".

Basically, it's a command-line tool written in Python for maintaining a Movable Type blog. I'm currently using it, with a hundred-line shell script (which also resizes photos and creates thumbnails, etc), to simplify adding new photos to my album with a single command at a shell. Curiously, though, I have to go to my MT backend in order to set the category to post under, because even if I specify one in the input file it ignores it and stores it without one. This might be a bug in MT, or it might be one in mtsend.py. And really, I don't care much; mtsend.py is extremely useful and makes my life a lot easier. And the fact that Unix makes it simple to link together lots of little tools like this is almost, but not quite, enough to make me not regret ever installing FreeBSD.

Posted by Lewis at November 16, 2005 11:05 PM