Ten years ago this month, I started studying Django by trying to build my own blog application. I found the code lying around while I was going through some backups lately. It’s way out of date, it uses an early version of django. I thought of bringing it up to speed, but that didn’t seem practical. Instead, for archival purposes, I cleaned it up a bit and uploaded the code to a github repo.
All entries tagged royondjango.
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Oct 2018
Feb 2009
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You may have noticed the new color scheme and new “Theme Switcher” widget in the sidebar. I had done some CSS work during the past month in the office and it made me want to tweak the stylesheets on this site a bit. I figured I might as well make it easy to switch stylesheets, so I wrote a small Theme Switcher django app. (Well, it’s more of a stylesheet switcher I guess)
Jan 2009
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I actually had some trouble using django-pingback on my custom blog engine; the django-pingback documentation is mostly fine, but there were some caveats that I had to discover myself through a bit of debugging: The URL specified for the XML-RPC endpoint in the HTML head needs to be a full absolute url including domain, i.e. http://roytang.net/xmlrpc/, which gave me trouble when I was trying to test using localhost pinging to an online server.
Dec 2008
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Frontend: All page templates are valid (X)HTML. However, I choose not to claim valid XHTML (and no doc type declaration) since I can’t guarantee that blog posts I write are compliant! The site uses standard CSS and uses the Blueprint CSS Framework for the grid layout of the page. The site design is entirely original (if not simple and bland – I’m not very good with website design yet!). The site has minor usage of JQuery Javascript library in some parts.
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I played around with the built-in comments app today, trying to clean it up. Some findings: Some of the moderation views, such as flagging a post or deleting a post, accept a next parameter that determines where the view will redirect to after the operation. However, the way the url’s are set up, there’s no easy way to pass this parameter normally, even through query strings. This lovely bug is documented in http://code.
Nov 2008
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I’ve been busy at work so fell a bit behind with Django. Last night I worked on a WordPress importer, so that I could migrate posts from my current blog(s) into the Django-powered blog that I’m coding. I’m using BeautifulSoup to parse the WordPress export file and insert them as Django objects. Since I was running the script repeatedly, I had to figure out how to easily run it from the command line, without having to run it from inside manage.
Oct 2008
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I wanted to add some basic tagging to my blog app so I tried out django-tagging. Unfortunately, the featured downloads on the Google Code site are quite out-of-date and would not work with Django 1.0, so I did a subversion checkout instead. If you’re getting an error like “ImportError: cannot import name parse_lookup”, then you need to get the source code from SVN. Adding the tagging to the blog was pretty easy:
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… and now it works! http://www.randomencounters.bells-n-whistles.net/blog/ I think the apache service needed to restart mod_python or something… (I don’t have SSH access so… )
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So I got a basic blog app up and running. Posting, paged archives, etc. Comments implemented using the django.contrib.comments. No problems here, the only caveat being most of the current documentation found by Google searches refer to the pre-1.0 version. Need to peruse the official docs for 1.0 stuff. RSS feeds implemented using django.contrib.syndication, this one seems fine. I tested it and it’s running fine on localhost. I also have a free django hosting account at http://bells-n-whistles.
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“when redirecting, how can I make the redirect URL decoupled from the urls.py of the parent app?” -> It turns out that HttpResponseRedirect supports relative paths, so this was fine. return HttpResponseRedirect("../" + str(post.id) + "/") I got the basic posting structure up. /post/new/ -> To make new posts /post// -> To view a single post /post/all/ -> To view all posts I should probably start thinking of a better url scheme.
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The quintessential app to learn from is of course a blog. Started using a simple Post model. Added the new post form and view. Can now successfully insert posts into the DB. Next: – create the detail page that will show the post after saving Figure out: – when redirecting, how can I make the redirect URL decoupled from the urls.py of the parent app? i.e. if the parent app has the following mapping: