The configuration of this blog has been explained earlier. There was one thing still missing from this blog --- comments.

The comments plugin that comes in the contrib tarball from the pyblosxom web site is well-documented and easy enough to install. One modification I made is to remove all the javascript stuff since I don't understand the latter.

After all this one still needs some sort of authentication to prevent complete rubbish from cluttering the comments section. The natural candidate was openid which is supported by a plugin from snarfed.org.

This seemed easy enough to configure except that there is no version of these libraries in Debian "etch" (which is what people.imsc.res.in runs). So I downloaded the latest 2.x.x version of these libraries. Since I rarely install my own python libraries, it took me a while to figure out that I need to run

python setup.py install --home $HOME

in order to install it in my home directory. This also needed the codebase variable to be set in config.py.

Unfortunately, this still did not work. The plugin comments_openid.py actually uses the API from the older 2.0.x version of the python-openid libraries.

Some error messages from our web server led me onto a completely different track and I thought that the rewrite rules from the .htaccess file were in error. This was a McGuffin and I had to revert to the comment-free version in order to clean-up the mess. Thank goodness for git!

The plugin currently works with the 2.0.x version of the libraries which may be mildly worse than the 2.1.x version.

Some other things which are not working are e-mail/rdf notification of comments. I don't know if I will bother to fix that.