The long-awaited (by me) conversion of this blog to Django is underway. After a couple hours’ work I have a full set of models and a functioning admin, and working index and detail views of postings and comments. Searching, posting comments, and tags are the major pieces remaining. Because of my busy schedule I’ll only be able to work on it in fits and starts, but I expect the total labor in the end to be about five hours.
I’ve tiptoed into the Web 2.0 world by adding a couple small Ajax features to the blog.
First, there’s now a “More” link at the top of my Random Bookmarks sidebar which fetches another seven random links from the server and plugs them into the page without reloading.
Second, I added a gratuitous animated roll-unroll toggle to the comment form, and made it closed by default. OK, that’s not Ajax, that’s just fluff.
My “Let’s play a game” post, featuring a simple number game implemented in three different scripting languages, has received many comments and updates in the few weeks it’s been up. There are now twelve implementations, seven written by me (wide variations in quality!) and five contributed by readers. The languages represented, as of today: Haskell, Io, JavaScript, Lisp, Logo, Lua, PHP, Prolog, Python, REBOL, Ruby, and Scheme.
I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and gotten some good ideas about which languages might be rewarding to dive into further. My favorite new discovery so far is Io. It’s clean, simple, consistent, and yet very pragmatic at the same time (e.g. lots of useful bindings, embeddable, etc.). The messaging syntax feels very natural, and the lack of brackets (cf. Objective-C) gives more than just visual relief: you don’t have to backtrack to the beginning of the expression to insert a bracket when you decide you need to chain one more message on the end.
Can’t stop tweaking the blog engine. Added:
.txt to any individual post URL to see the Markdown source, like this (mostly added for the benefit of people curious about Markdown)I’ve recently moved the Wellblogs aggregator to my server from its former home. It’s a simple “planet” style presentation that shows the last week’s worth of posts across a few dozen blogs written by members of The Well.
The software is a Python engine written by Michael Josephson, and I’ve been very impressed with it so far. It’s based on Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, a MySQL data store, Cheetah templates, and some extra bits to gracefully handle the inevitable connection failures involved when fetching dozens of disparate feeds every hour. Getting everything working was a breeze, and as someone doing more web development in Python lately I’m finding the code interesting reading. Hopefully the blogs are too!
I’ve rearranged a few things in the page template and added a couple features:
In the queue: comment preview, delicious/reddit/digg bookmarking links. How many more tweaks will I do before migrating away from PHP5? I really should do it while I still have a chance of cleaning up and releasing the code.
Just made some minor improvements to the RSS infrastructure here on the site:
There are now feeds that allow you to follow comments on an individual post (look for the “comment feed” button).
I created a minimal stylesheet so that feed-reader-less users will see something a little prettier and more informative in their browser if they attempt to view a feed directly. There’s much more I could do here (with XSL for instance), but it’s a start. This actually was the first time I’d ever written a stylesheet for XML content.