• Template tags in Django

    Posted on 2008-06-15 22:36:06

    I was messing around today with django-gencal but the lack of an easy to follow documentation was a bit of a problem. I got some help from the official Django docs but most especially from this excelent post/howto from James Bennett.

    PS: Just needed to reference this for future use. My delicious account has way too much stuff.

    Tags: django, template tags

  • Google Code to RSS Feeds

    Posted on 2008-05-06 20:37:49

    As part of a class this semester, we are suposed to build a web-based project that can/must have bits of various technologies such as Javascript (Ajax), XML, Regular Expressions, XSLT, Web Services or Database integration.

    I was looking into doing something usefull, so I decided to tackle a "problem" I'm having at the moment with Django: The lack of RSS feeds for open source projects listed in Google Code.

    The goal is to create a RESTful web service so you can retrive "Changes" and "Issues" in RSS (and eventualy JSON) format for any project.

    My plan is to have a simple interface in Django, and a Python cronjob running every hour or so checking the source. The projects table will start empty and new projects will be added automaticly when necessary. If possible I will try to add some way to check how many users are subscribed to a particular feed (still have to figure out how).

    I will be detailing my experiences here, and sharing the source code along the way.

    Tags: gcode google code rss django python

  • About this website

    Posted on 2008-04-27 00:18:59

    Now for some things about this website..

    I've been learning Python, and Django in the past few weeks, and as part of the learning process I needed some practice, thus I decided to build this website from scratch instead of just going with wordpress. I'm pretty happy with out it turned out, and the experience was really usefull. Anyway, let's move along..

    Python is very easy language to pick up, the syntax is very clean and there are a lot of open source projects and code examples around. I used diveintopython, a free online book (but also available commercially) to get my first look at the language.

    I then started with Django, and went trough to the tutorial, but I recomend you to take a look at the free online book first. The Documentation is also worth very much to take a look at, and it's noticeable that a lot of effort was made in this part aswell.

    On to the technical part, I decided to use the auto admin in Django (why wouldn't I) and a very very good tagging app. On a side note, you can find a lot of very useful plugins/apps in www.djangopluggables.com. I also used Nuno Mariz code for friendfeed integrating my Google reader shared feeds and flickr account. The rest was up to me, not much at this point as well, but the objectives were met: implement views, templates, forms and raw sql. I also decided to use sqlite as database, which is natively supported by python.

    On the hosting part, my inexperience with setting up production servers, and the fact that I don't have that many projects to host, were the only things preventing me to buy a slice at slicehost, but the excellent articles were reason enough to venture in this area as well. The very good feedback that floats around in the web about them is true, it's really a great service and it is worth to take a look at even if you are considering shared hosting.

    So that's it, I will probably release the source code sometime. It is very simple, but in the meantime if someone is interested you can just drop me an email at mlouro _at_ zolbe dot com and I will happily send it.

    Tags: django slicehost tagging blog

  • Hello world!

    Posted on 2008-04-20 01:05:04

    This is my first post on my django Powered Blog!

    Tags: hello django