The first annual DjangoCon will take place September 6th and 7th at the Googleplex in Mountain View. It will coordinate with the 1.0 release of the popular web application framework, and will include a release party on Saturday night. There is only space for about 200 attendees, but the conference is free (you are, however, encouraged to make an optional donation to the Django Software Foundation to help cover costs). Visit site »
Clint Ecker has a nice review on Ars of my buddy James Bennett’s new book, Practical Django Projects. Visit site »
This is extremely similar to an internal app we used to The Lawrence Journal-World, and to one I’ve used on some of my personal project. For those of us well-versed in HTML and such, it may not be necessary (you can just put these bits straight into your templates), but if you need arbitrary pieces of content to be manageable via the Django admin interface (so that some non-HTML savvy folks can edit them, for example), it works well. Visit site »
Carsonified’s four-day Django gem has launched. It’s a little tool that lets you easily post a single tweet to multiple Twitter accounts. Although it’s not something I particularly need (I only use one Twitter account), it’s a nice example of how quickly a team can make something cool with Django, and it’s got a freaking wonderful illustrated design, to boot. Congrats, Carsonified! Visit site »
Webmonkey has jumped on the Django bandwagon with this nice tutorial on how to get up and running with the Python-based web application framework. Visit site »
I’ll be heading over to London, my favorite city in the world (so far, anyway), to give a full-day workshop on building a custom CMS using Django. The workshop is being put on my the awesome folks at Carsonified, and you can register right now, if you like! Having been to several Carsonified events, I can say with a great deal of certainty that no one out there runs conferences and workshops more smoothly than this crew. Should be a great day.
I will definitely blog at more length about this event in the near future, but for now, head over to the Carson Workshops site and check it out. Visit site »
My good friends at Carsonified are building a web app in a week, and live-blogging the process. Ryan says:
Keir recently came up with a really fun web app idea … so the whole team is taking a week off to build it. It’s going to be called ‘Matt’ and it’ll be built in Django on a popular API, include a desktop AIR app, and will be hosted on an elastic computing cloud (probably Flexiscale, but yet to be determined).
Sounds like fun. Should be entertaining to watch the blog as they do this. Good luck, guys! Visit site »
A nice interview with Django co-creator and “journalism via programming” pioneer Adrian Holovaty. If you’ve been drinking Adrian’s kool-aid for a while (as I have), you’re not likely to find much new here, but if you aren’t familiar with Adrian and what he does, this interview should give you a nice overview.
42 Topics also has interviews with several others in the Django community, including Jacob Kaplan-Moss and James Bennett, available for your perusal. Visit site »
Django now has a foundation, similar to that of Mozilla and Apache. From the foundation page:
Development of Django is supported by an independent foundation established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Like most Open Source foundations, the goal of the Django Foundation is to promote, support, and advance the Django web framework.
Predictably, LJWorld.com has the scoop. :) Visit site »
Django 1.0 will be released in September. It’s about time. :) Visit site »
Bret Walker’s simple Django-powered web app related to salaries. Its data is user-generated: you put in your job title, location, and salary. Hopefully this build a nice database of salary info, which is incredibly useful for many, many reasons. Visit site »
A Django template tag implementation of OEmbed, the afore-mentioned API for getting embedding URLs from media sharing sites. The tag was written by Eric Florenzano, and was brought to my attention by Justin Lilly. Thanks, guys! Visit site »
You can now use memcached with Google’s App Engine. Sweet. Visit site »
Another new Django book on the horizon. Visit site »
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful. Visit site »
A new package which aims to let you associate Django users with OpenIDs, providing a login workflow similar to that of ma.gnolia. Haven’t tried it, but it sounds good! Visit site »
Simon talks about some of the killer features of the Django ORM, including chaining and laziness. For what its worth, I love the Django ORM and virtually never write a line of SQL because of it. I know a lot of people complain that it’s not as robust as SQL Alchemy, but for my needs, it’s perfect. It’s easy to use, and I’ve only run into one situation I couldn’t handle with it (and, Django gives you the ability to write straight SQL, when you do run into that situation). Visit site »
Leah released a Python FOAF file generator, which uses the Django user model as its source. Pownce is using it, and now you can, too. Sweet. Visit site »
Nice looking project, here. This is very much the same as what I do on jeffcroft.com, but it’d a bit more lightweight and the importers are probably better-written (I’m still not a great programer!). My stuff will be open-sourced at some point — but it’s good to have options, and this is available now. Visit site »
Maura is the latest Django geek to go all tumblelog-style with her latest blog design. It looks great! Check it out. Visit site »
An open source MMO engine, initially based on Game Neverending, written in Django. Sweet. Visit site »
Steve’s made it easy to manage connections between Django user accounts and Fire Eagle tokens. Sah-weet! Visit site »
Has anyone else noticed that the official Django blog seems to be dead? No new posts in almost three months. Yikes. That’s not a good look. Visit site »
Bryan Veloso releases a nice-looking and well-thought out site for finding third-party Django apps to plug into your site. Nicely-done, my friend! Visit site »
Google announces App Engine, a wonderful-looking set of tools and APIs that lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. Nice. What’s more? It’s entirely written in Python, and Python is also the first supported language for App Engine apps (more are coming down the road). What’s even more? App Engine includes Django. That is to say, Google wants you to use Django to write your applications, just like they use it to write many of theirs. If that’s not a good endorsement, I don’t know what is. Visit site »
Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug, iUI, and an early developer on Firefox, just finished new the version of his blog — his first Django app — and says: “This was my first Django app and I can say without qualification that Django rocks. It was so easy that I wrote most of the code on airplanes while flying across the country.” Visit site »
I’m not entirely convinced that Django’s recent popularity has much to do with web standards, nor am I that convinced that Django is “winning” in our community over Rails or other modern frameworks — but, it’s true that Django allows those of us who value web standards to do our thing quite easily, and it’s good to hear that people are noticing that. Visit site »
Django is totally “wired,” according to this month’s magazine. It feels good to be on the bleeding edge. Well, except that I’m still into teledildonics, which is now “Tired.” Damn. Visit site »
Ryan Berg’s simple but elegant new site lets users rate and review web hosting services on their Django-friendliness. WebFaction FTW! Visit site »
Jon Udell interviews Adrian Holovaty, creator of Django, EveryBlock, and ChicagoCrime, and all-around computer journalism guru. 41-minute MP3. Visit site »