DjangoSites Gets New Shoes

Posted by Ross Poulton on Wed 30 April 2008 #design #djangosites #hosting #django #openid

I launched DjangoSites publicly last June, and since then we've had over 1,250 websites submitted to what has become the ultimate directory of Django-powered websites.

The look and feel of the site didn't seem to have the same zing that many of the listed sites had though, so after a quick chat with the ever-creative Martin 'maddiin' Czura he was able to put together a new design that we both think is a great improvement.

The new design is already online at DjangoSites.org, with a few nifty changes as well as the colour scheme such as an improved navigation bar and less cluttered positioning of user account options.

At the same time, the website has been moved to a new VPS with KnownHost. I've been using KnownHost for over a year now and their VPS hosting is fantastic. The support from them has always been helpful, and their prices are very reasonable for what has been a very reliable service.

I updated the TTL for the djangosites.org domain a few weeks back, so by the time this post goes live the new IP address should be accessible to anybody with properly configured DNS servers. I encourage you to do a forced reload (using Ctrl-Reload in FireFox in Windows, I assume it's similar for other browsers) to ensure that the new stylesheet and graphics are loaded.

If you do find yourself getting to the blue design on the old server, you will not be able to submit sites, vote, or leave comments until your ISP realises there has been a change in IP address.

Don't forget, we now have OpenID support so you don't need a username and password to sign up. Since my announcement that OpenID was available a fortnight ago, there have been 44 signups of which 18 have used OpenID exclusively (not including users who added an OpenID to their existing account). It's fantastic to see this type of momentum behind OpenID - it would be interesting to see similar statistics from other websites.

As always, any problems or suggestions can be sent to me at djangosites at djangosites.org. Enjoy!