paragiraffe

I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about Django, “the Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines,” which I used to build my new site. Although I had heard of it previously (I swear) I got really introduced to Django when James got hired at World Online, the online division of the Lawrence Journal-World, where Django was developed. Frameworks encourage not only quicker development by doing a lot of the tedious work for you, but they encourage development with best practices, something I’m heavily interested in now that I’m having to go back and change/maintain code I wrote years ago.

Why Django?

Maybe you haven’t heard of Django, but possibly you’ve heard of Ruby on Rails, another framework that’s gotten a lot of press, developed by 37signals. I picked up the Rails book last year, got really excited at first, then proceeded to beat my head into the wall actually trying to use it. It’s not that Rails isn’t great, it’s that I’m no Ruby programmer and probably never will be. Although I should probably revisit Rails at some point, I can’t imagine how you’d ever do much with it without really getting into Ruby.

Django, on the other hand, is written in Python, a much, much friendlier language, at least for me, and still object-oriented. And Python is used by a small company you may have heard of: Google. Additionally, in my humble opinion, Django is about 5498345098345 times easier to use than Rails, and you can do a lot with it even without doing much programming. (I’ll have some further reading on this at the end.)

So, the blog

For a long time I’ve wrestled with using Movable Type—the rebuilding, the 45098345 database tables it creates, how technically it costs money now. I didn’t want to use WordPress, although it is my current party line as far as what blogging platform I recommend. But, being a programmer, the right thing to do at this point was custom-build something for myself. So I did.

I won’t bore you with the specifics, but getting my post archives/comments moved over from Movable Type was a lot easier than I expected, just a series of commands in my database. (Then I deleted all of the really old stuff, the most cathartic thing I’ve done in a long time.) Although I’ve been tinkering with things around here for some time, someone who halfway knew what they were doing could get a blog up with Django significantly faster.

And that’s all from me

If you’re at all interested in Django, try the polls tutorial. (Django has really excellent online documentation and a book in progress.) For an idea of what you can do with Django when you’re not even a programmer, check out Jeff Croft’s blog and specifically the post Django for non-programmers. Finally, check out Wilson Miner‘s Are you generic? on generic views (common situations Django gives you the code for, such as monthly archives or a listing page). Much thanks goes to James for answering my questions, however inane, and various others (most already mentioned) for Django/design inspiration.

<% @students.each do |s| %>
<p><%= s.name %></p>
<% end %>

{% for s in students %}{{ s.name }}{% endfor %}

for s in student:
    print s