Weblog Updates

Posted by Ross Poulton on Thu 10 April 2008 #tumblog #meta #django

My previous blog was my first ever Django application. It worked well, but it was beginning to feel a little clumsy.

For example, I had to write posts in HTML. Markdown would be much nicer. I also had separate applications to syndicate links, blog posts, photos, and more. It all felt like a bit of a dogs breakfast.

So, inspired by Jacob Kaplan-Moss' jellyroll, and other 'all in one' blog solutions I've seen lately, I've built a somewhat-complete tumblog system in Django. It lets me syndicate links from Magnolia, my blog posts, selected quotes, and soon, photos. Tags are shared across the board, and there is no real separation of content types to the end user.

The nice part from my point of view is that I can link to websites I find in my travels, adding commentary, without writing a whole blog post. It can also let me use the neat Magnolia bookmarklets to add links nice and quickly.

Lastly, I've published a more minimalist design and removed blog comments. Right now, I'm not one to write provocative blog posts that stir great discussion, so I doubt they'll really be missed. Any comments or thanks can be e-mailed to my first name at this domain.

For now I won't be releasing code to this site, as all of the fun parts (a common 'Item' model using generic foreign keys across content types, for example) can be found in jellyroll. I strongly suggest you take a look at it, as it is a great example of how to use generic foreign keys - a very powerful feature that I think is slightly under-estimated in Django.