EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet. Visit site »
Via Jacob, here’s a clever method for using Markdown to insert images into the content of a blog post, article, or whathaveyou. As Jacob notes, it’s similar to the concept of “inlines,” pioneered in Ellington, and later implemented in Nathan’s Basic Apps and my Savoy. It’s not as flexible as inlines (with inlines, you can insert any object, not just images, and you can access all attributes of your object, not just the file URL), but it’s a lot simpler, too. If you just need to plop images into a chunk of text, this will work great. Visit site »
A nice piece on Webmonkey about how to build a basic tumblelog with Django. The technique used is similar in concept (but a bit simpler) than what I’ve done here at jeffcroft.com. Note, though, that the Django signals bit in the article refers to the syntax for signals before a recent API change, so you’ll need minor changes to the code in the article to make it work with the current version of Django. Visit site »
I’ll be damned if it doesn’t seem like this whole Django 1.0 thing might actually happen. Be sure to read the release notes — there are several backwards incompatible changes (which are annoying, but it’s way better to get them out of the way before 1.0 than after it). Visit site »
Although a good old manage.py startapp will give you a very simple file stricture to get started with, there are a number of Django conventions that aren't represented by it (and for good reason). For example, if you're going to provide middleware with your app, it's sort of accepted that you would store them in middleware.py. However, this isn't documented anywhere, and it's definitely led to a slew of projects existing on Google Code which don't follow these conventions. This page, which was originally written in German and is being translated (sort of poorly) by Google, goes over the common file and directory names. It's a good start at something I really think ought to be somewhere in the Django proper documentation. Sure, you can put name these files whatever you want, but having standard ways of doing things can only make things cleaner and more usable. Visit site »
This Week in Django, which truly is one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to in any genre, has a new website. If you’re not already listening, you should be. Michael Trier, Brian Rosner, and Kevin Frivcovsky do a really, really great job. Honestly, it’s about the only Django resource I pay attention to. Being as design is my main focus, I don’t subscribe to many Django/Python blogs, I don’t really use the IRC channel, and I never read the Google Groups — and yet, I always feel like I know what’s going on with Django. That’s thanks in large part to TWiD.
Congrats on the new site, guys. It looks great. Visit site »
Nathan shows how simple it is to create a basic REST API for an existing Django app, as he has done for his great new site, Readernaut. Visit site »
Guido, Python’s creator and programmer God, has this to say about Django:
Django is still my favorite — not only is it a pretty darn good web framework that matches my style of developing, it is also an exemplary example of a good open source project, run by people who really understand community involvement.
That’s a solid endorsement. Via Jacob. Visit site »
GeoDjango is so far over my head that it doesn’t meant much to be, but I hear it’s awesome news, so I figured I’d link it up. :) Visit site »
Eric’s got a terrific screencast about setting up a Django development environment on Mac. He goes through it step-by-step from the very beginning, and it’s all very easy to understand. There are a million different ways to set up your dev enviroment, but I really liked some of the things Eric was doing in his setup — it’s actually making me rethink the way I usually set mine up.
There’s also a screencast of Eric’s app django-pagination, which looks really sweet. I’m definitely going to look into it more and see if it’s appropriate for my projects. You should, too. Visit site »
I found this great writeup of Django’s signals on Twitter today. Signals are an incredibly useful tool in Django, and one that is way under-utilized. I used them a lot back when I wrote the second version of lost-theories.com, and I use them a little bit in the Savoy content publishing framework I’ve written at Blue Flavor. I especially make great use of the pre and post save, and pre and post delete signals. Check ‘em out. Visit site »
You can now use a separate model to manage the relationship of a ManyToMany field. Because “sometimes you may need to associate data with the relationship between two models.” Indeed.
This reminds me of another item that should be on the Top Ten Things That Suck About Django list: constant new features that make me want to rewrite code that’s working just fine. How annoying. :) Visit site »
On this week’s podcast, Michael Trier and Brian Rosner talk a bit about my recent blog post, Top ten things that suck about Django, revisited. Their guests for the week are the developers of the popular Django e-commerce solution Satchmo, so they participate in the discussion, as well. I was happy to find that they considered the post a healthy discussion and found some value in it. The guys talk about several things mentioned in the post, including django.contrib.search, bulk delete in the admin interface, and the Python/Django install process. It's a great listen, and not just for the part about my post. In general, if you're not already listening to This Week in Django, you should be. These guys are doing a really, really great job. Visit site »
A nice new site by David Larlet archiving a collection of open source reusable Django apps for such technologies as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, RDF, FOAF, REST, Atom, and so forth. Visit site »
Django helps with several SEO-friendly techniques. Among them: beautiful URLs and Google sitemaps. To be fair, you can do these things in a number of frameworks and CMSes, so Django is not alone. But, Django does make these things incredibly easy, whereas they can be tricky to achieve in some other systems. As Django lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss puts it:
99% of SEO is snake oil. Django does the other 1% very, very well.
Indeed. Visit site »
Randal Schwartz of the TWiT networks’ FLOSS podcast interviewed Django lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss for the show’s latest episode. It’s a great interview, which covers everything from Django’s history to how it compares to Rails and other Python frameworks, to what Jacob hates about PHP and Java, to and general overview of what Django is and how it works. Really good stuff. If you’re curious about Django, definitely check it out. Visit site »
Webmonkey continues its series on Django with a piece on the framework’s template language. Visit site »
In which I revisit a post a made two years ago and see just how far Django has come.
Kevin from howiworkdaily.com had my good friend and design hero Nathan Borror on the line for a 30 minute podcast. They two discuss Django, Basic Apps, playgroundblues.com, the iPhone, and more. It’s a really good listen.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll take the opportunity to say it again: Nathan Borror is absolutely the most underrated web professional on the Internet. He’s quite possibly the most talented person I’ve ever worked with. His attention to detail and breadth of knowledge across all aspects of web work is surpassed only by his sympathy for the user. I know just about every amazing designer in this industry, and Nathan would still be the first person I’d call if I were hiring.
And, he’s a great fucking guy, too.
(Nathan, you owe me dinner, or something.) Visit site »