A bunch of reasonably useful modules

These were created during a hackathon at ActiveState last month.  I've been given permission to contribute them back, providing the ActiveState copyright notice can stay in the modules.

There are a couple of stand-alone modules (blog, welcome)

The others depend on the 'staff' module, which marks users as staff members.  The other modules do different things depending on whether or not the requesting nick is marked as staff.

There's also one modification to the madcow core so that the 'welcome' module can send the welcome message as a private conversation with the specified nick.

Caveat: I'm not super python-fluent, so there may be some hideous code in there. I tried my best to follow your coding style. 

Feel free to fix anything horrendous in the code that I overlooked.

-t.