Little Changes

Its not terribly interesting, but I’ve made a couple of very little changes to the site…

• I finally updated my install of Django from pre-1.0 to 1.0.2. Feels good! Though really anyone else shouldn’t notice any difference. I’m really starting to look forward to Django 1.1!

• The tree branches that go all the way down the page on the left side now alternate colors… woo!

• I’ve made site searching more thorough.

• I’ve done a bit of re-organizing. I’ve finally gotten rid of the Swag section. I still have the Cinema section. However random reviews of other things (such as tv shows or random stuff) will still happen. Until I can think of a better section for it, they’ll just be regular articles that happen to have ratings.

Running Django on (mt)

So, I’ve been running on the (mt) Django beta container for a couple of weeks now. So far its been great. I’ve received some questions about it so I figured I’d write up a few notes on the Django container…

• You get total control over your app without having to manage an entire server.

• The level of control vs. stability is perfect. This is my most favorite thing ever.

• You set up and control your Django project/app with a set of terminal commands that all begin with mtd.

• Overall, it’s been extremely stable. I’d venture to say it seems more stable than the Rails container I used to use… my app has not crashed once yet.

• You can run on either the last released version of Django or the latest SVN of Django, and switch back and forth with a couple of mtd commands. You can also just download the SVN yourself if you want to be on a specific revision.

• Note: if you’re running the container on a current SVN of Django (rev. 8015 or above) you will need to add this line to your settings.py for it to run properly:

  FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME = ''

I have to say that (mt) has blown my expectations away as far as hosting is concerned, and the Django container is just a part of that. I’d highly recommend them.

Stupid-Simple Django Admin Previews

Incase you didn’t know, I love Django.

I love how Django just makes things stupid-simple, such as with its built-in automatic admin interface. Yet one thing it did not provide was an optional post-preview, where you could see exactly what your post will look like once it is live without others being able to see it.

For me this was a must-have feature. So I quickly thought up a stupid-simple way to add admin previews.

This technique works with or without newforms-admin and is insanely easy to implement.

(Read the rest)

Django!

Excitement!

I have switched from Rails to Django. Ideally this isn’t too big of a change for you, but it is for me. For the first time ever, I have written my own backend!

For the most part it was simple and incredibly fun. Basically its something I though I’d never be able to do, so I’m way too excited about it. Most things should be about the same. If you find any errors or 404’s, please let me know.

Every few months, I had gone to the Django website, looked around a bit, and chickened out. This last time, though, I started reading about it a bit more. I found some various sites made with Django. Then I read that Mephisto’s template language, Liquid, was based on Django’s built-in template language. That was enough for me to get the book and dive in.

As soon as I did, I totally fell in love. A couple days later and things just started flowing. Next thing I knew, I was a part of the (mt) Django beta and here we are!

I’m sure I’ll be talking more about it soon. With any luck its faster and more fun for all.

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