Fauskes.net is now powered by Django

• Published 2006-08-13 (1 year, 9 months ago)

Several great things have happened here at fauskes.net recently:

• My web site is now hosted by Webfaction.
• The backend of this web site has been completely rewritten using the Django web framework.

Why Django?

My previous implementation of fauskes.net was a mix of static HTML, PHP, and MySQL on the server, combined with a set of Python scripts for enabling things like syntax coloring and equation rendering. The system was incomplete, clumsy and required too much work to add and update content. A few months ago I started to look for alternative ways of publishing for the web and writing web applications.

I'm a big fan of the Python programming language so it felt natural for me to choose from Python based web frameworks like Django, Turbogears, Zope, and CherryPy. I didn't consider other frameworks like Ruby on Rails and symfony. Not because they are bad, but just because I prefer Python.

I instantly got attracted to Django. Here are some of the more or less objective reasons:

• The Django web site has an elegant and sleek design, appealing to the designer wannabe in me.
• It's based on Python!
• I like its design philosophy.
• Excellent documentation.
• No need to write SQL. Data models are defined and used as Python classes.
• Django can automagically create great looking admin interfaces.
• The number and quality of sites powered by Django is impressive.
• Guido likes Django.
• Friendly user community.

What's new?

The design of fauskes.net is basically the same as before. There are however a few notable changes to the functionality and organization of the site:

• The URL structure of the site is slightly modified. Old URLs will still work.
• RSS feeds are now available for each notebook category.
• Notebook entries are now entirely stored in a database.
• Readers can now post comments to notebook entries.
• Reorganized categories. Decided not to use nested categories.

Not everything is finished yet and there are probably some bugs lurking around. It has taken quite some time to get used to the Django way of doing things.