Blog Post Archive

After almost twelve months online and well over a thousand sites submitted, DjangoSites has had a facelift and moved to a new hosting home.

One of the coolest things to happen to the Internet in the past few years is OpenID, the decentralised system that allows you to use a single 'login' mechanism across multiple websites. OpenID support in Django is coming of age, and I've just implemented it at DjangoSites.

Apologies for the recent RSS spam, where all of my posts were re-published. The reason was a new blog system I'm using, syndicating my actions around the web into a single 'tumblog' style feed.

I've been blogging here about bridal gift registries for well over a year now. All of that talk has resulted in the creation of WhisperGifts, a Django-powered service that allows couples to host their bridal gift registry online with minimal fuss and maximum benefit for everybody: The couple getting married AND their guests. Read on for some benefits of the service.

In my previous post I mentioned Jutda, a Django-powered company that I'm working on in my spare time. I would now like to formally introduce Jutda to the Django community and outline a few exciting projects that are on their way. World, meet Jutda!w

A quick update on a few projects including DjangoSites, WhisperGifts, Jutda, a Django-powered Forum package, and my OpenID implementation.

Although Django's template system is very easy to get the hang of, it's not for everybody. In particular, it's not for people whose job it is to publish content without having any technical know-how. For this reason, I'm giving away a simple menuing application for Django that lets your content editors addand change menu items without bothering your template authors.

Getting married? I'm looking for people to help with a final round of Beta testing for my Django-powered Bridal Registry service. We've done some extensive testing so far, and now need a few people getting married in the next few months to finalise testing before a public launch.

I've spent some significant time over the past weekend moving website listings from the old DjangoPoweredSites wiki page to DjangoSites. That brings the total number of Django-driven websites listed to over 800! We'll now close down the wiki page as it has become redundant, but require a little bit of help cleansing the new list.

Django provides an easy way to send multi-part text/HTML messages. I've recently built on top of this existing framework to provide an ultra-easy way to send templated HTML and plain-text messages with minimal code duplication.

In these days of cheap domains, it's often desirable to own multiple domains for a single website. You've probably got each of the .com, .net and .org domain names, along with a country-specific domain. You want each of these to present exactly the same website to the world, but good design says that each web page should have one, and exactly one, URL. So what's the best way to serve this up without having an Apache config for each domain?

Scott Barnham, one of the guys behind the recently-launched Django Gigs website, has posted some statistics from visitors to the Gigs website over the past few days. I've put together some similar stats for the Django Sites website, which has been online for a few months now.

OpenID is a de-centralised authentication system that is making a splash in a big way. In this post I give an overview of what OpenID is, and how I'm going about integrating it with Django's user-management / authentication system.

The phrase 'simplifying the user experience' (or it's cousins) is thrown around regularly these days, without many examples on HOW to actually make life easier for the end user. In my opinion it's about removing needless junk wherever possible, letting the user focus on what's actually important. A simple example I've extracted from a current project is minimising needless page loads. Read on to find out how I validate availability of a username during the Django registration process.

We're at 260 sites listed on DjangoSites. The DjangoPoweredSites page has 3-4 times that number - so if you've got a website built with Django, why not submit it (for free, no less) and show it off to the world?