Site Relanch: Update II

Apologies, first off, for this blog being so "meta" lately, but I thought I'd offer an update on the site redesign progress. And the update is: meh. The project currently stands at 1069 lines of python, 170 lines of html and 122 lines of CSS. The blogging and tumblelog apps are completely done, including comments, tagging and the ability to cross-post tumblelog entries to a Twitter account. I've templated all the views and done some basic styling. And I do mean basic. Here's a screenshot of a blog entry detail page:

Progress on my personal site relaunch for Sitesprint II continues apace. At this point all the work has been on the backend code but my gains there have been good. In my last post I set some ground rules which I have so far kept, including five significant commits to my code repository per week. Admittedly, it’s only been one week, but whatever... The result is Belleville, a blogging CMS written in Django. As I mentioned, this site currently runs in a Django-based CMS I wrote a while ago. Does the world really need yet another django-based blogging CMS? Or another blogging CMS at all? Well, no, probably not; but I do. And my hope is that this one represents a good example of code that is idiomatic to Django, is extensible, offers a nice feature set, and is easy to theme; in other words, I hope other folks might find it useful too. It’s open source and free for the taking.

I happened to post about redoing my personal site the same day a coworker pointed me to Sitesprint. The idea behind it is to stop procrastinating and launch or re-launch your personal site by December 15th. The rules are simple:

1. launch by 12/15
2. document your process
3. on launch, share what you did and how you did it

If you followed the progress of my django site-seach module, you'll know I'm the procrastinating type. Definitely. So I signed up and I'm hoping this will give me the kick in the pants I need to knock this thing out. Forthwith a few personal rules:

• 5 signifigant contribs to the svn repo for my new site CMS per week.
• One blog post about the prcess per week
• Feature-complete by 11/25
• Design (such as it is) done by 12/1
• Design coded by 12/5
• Soft launch 12/10

So, we'll see how it goes. The coding part I'm not worried about, to be honest. But design...ugh. I've tried to redesign this site about 5 times since I launched, and I wasn't happy with anything I came up with, which is why the site still looks like it does.

This blog is written in Django, as mentioned in other posts. Other than a few minor improvements, it's basically the same code I wrote over year ago. I've decided it's time for a rewrite for two reasons. Firstly, I know a lot more about Django now than I did then and there are some things I'd like to improve and some functionality I'd like to add. Secondly, this format doesn't really fit my life. I like doing longer-form entries but rarely have the time, and as a result, there's not a whole lot going on here. My new blog will have a more-frequently-updated tumbleog feed right alonside the normal blog feed (Simon Willison's blog inspired this idea.) There will be RSS feeds for both, separately and together. You can follow my progress or grab the code for your own use.

I'm also planning to move hosting. I'm using Dreamhost now, which is fine as commodity hosts go, but they really don't handle Django well. They force you to use fast-cgi which is bad for a number of reasons and they also like to kill fast-cgi processes, which causes the occasional 500 error to show up around here (just refresh and you should get the page you want). I understand why they want to do this, but the end result is that this just isn't a good place for Django. I'm looking into webfaction, as I've deployed Django apps there before and liked it, but other suggestions are appreciated.

Finally, I'd like to redesign this. Frankly, though, I'm not a good designer—or a designer at all, really—so it probably won't look much better.

Update: Same day I post this, I see Sitesprint. So I went ahead and signed this site up for it.

I’ve been thinking about learning a new programming language. Python is where I spend the majority of my time now, and while I certainly don’t know every nook and cranny of it, two-and-a-half years of regular use has left me feeling I know it pretty darn well.

Don’t get me wrong: I still love Python and I hope to continue using it for a long while. It’s just that it’s gotten a little...comfortable. I’d like to try something that will expand my horizons and challenge me in different ways than Python has. I figure it takes a good 6 months of regular use to get really comfortable with a language, so I want to be sure I pick one that’s worth it. I’m a web developer, so I’d like a language I can actually use in that context. Based on that, there’s a couple of languages I’ve already decided to cross off my list: