A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map. Visit site »
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 »
Sounds like a good gig for the right person! 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 »
In response to a Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch that as clearly designed to irritate, Ev and Biz at Twitter politely explain several details of their architecture and how Twitter works, and what they’re doing to make the service more reliable in the future. Nice. 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 »
Leah Culver announces a new open standard for getting the URL to embedded content via an API endpoint. Smart. Currently supported by Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce, Revision3 and Hulu. Vimeo and Blip.tv are working on implementations, as well. Visit site »
You can now use memcached with Google’s App Engine. Sweet. Visit site »
Google is now serving copies of popular Javascript libraries, including Prototype, Mootools, jQuery, and Dojo, to help with caching. Nice. Visit site »
Several months ago, I spoke at Refresh Seattle. Kenny Meyers came. We met and became friends. For months, he has bothered me to write a blog post on the topic I spoke about, rehashing my slides and presentation. For months, I ignored him. So, the bastard wrote the blog post himself.
And it’s good. Check it out. Visit site »
Another new Django book on the horizon. Visit site »
After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking. Visit site »
I don’t know many other languages well, but I do know that Python was the first language that ever really made sense to me — and I attribute that, in large part, to the clean syntax and large collection of included and third-party libraries. 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 »
Friend of Blue Flavor, Kenny Meyers, has a blog. Its first post is titled, “Peaxal.com is up. Fuck you.” It’s funny. Kenny’s a smart and witty young dude who’s also a talented writer — this is a blog to watch. 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 »
In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally ...
Adam Howell at Vitamin posts part one of a good-looking tutorial on developing in Python with Google App Engine. 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 »
Authentic Jobs now as a publicly-available API! I’ve been beta testing this for a while (it’s how I’m showing job related to the content of my blog entries on each entry’s page), and it works great. So, if you’ve got a clever idea for how you could repurpose the job, company, and geographic information at AJ, go register for a key and get to coding! Visit site »
Flickr launches code.flickr.com, a site dedicated to their open source projects, their API, and everything development as it related to Flickr. Nice. Visit site »
An open source MMO engine, initially based on Game Neverending, written in Django. Sweet. Visit site »