Once again, the frequency of my blogging has become worse than erratic, and I largely blame this on my increasing distaste for both the aesthetic of my blog (which I have ideas about fixing), and the frustration of not being able to use my normal workflow to publish.

I am using Serendipity, a PHP blogging system, which is very good, but forces a web-based administrative interface. I would ideally be able to send email to a server and have it publish new entries for me. It should read the headers of the email for publication date and subject, the body of the email for the content of the post, and strip out both normal signatures and gpg signatures, and parse a line like tags: foo, bar, baz and tag entries with them.

I could certainly hack this into Serendipity, but I would really rather not.

I would like the software to be able to handle things like publishing the last n images from flickr, the last n tweets/identi.ca updates, etc, as well as blogish posts, longer articles and general content. I guess this places it as a combination of a CMS and Blogging tool. The email interface should be able to tell the difference between a new article and a new post, using something like type: blog or type: article, similar to the tagging instruction.

It has to be themable obviously, and finally, the most interesting point is that I want it to be written in a language I don't know, so that if I want to hack on it I have opportunity to learn something new. I think at this point my preference would be Python.

So dear lazyweb: do you have any suggestions for me?

Edit: 2 new requirements: the incoming mail handler should be able to check a gpg signature, and only import mail that has been signed by me. The UI should not require JS and instead use progressive enhancement techniques.