Newness
May 4, 2007 (3 comments)
Things are really different around here now, let me tell you. If you're in the land of RSS readers right now, you might not notice a difference, but if you come on over, you'll see there is a completely new website. I started from scratch once again and built an entire website with my own two hands. When smizell.com first came into existence, it was a train wreck of badly coded Ruby on Rails apps. I then decided to be really cool and make my own framework in PHP, which turned out to be a mess in itself. I finally went back to Ruby on Rails and actually built a CMS so I didn't have to write SQL queries to make a post. That went out the window and in came SimpleLog, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting a great application to run your site. I liked SimpleLog, but it wasn't my own, it was someone else's and that just didn't feel right.
That brings us to this day and this update. The update came a little early because there are many things on the site that aren't finished (e.g. archives and markup). I went with something a little different this time and built this site with Django instead of the normal Ruby on Rails or PHP. It was fun, easy, and it should allow me to add some more apps very quickly in the future (hint hint Kyser if you're reading this).
Since I started my new job at MSU, I've been developing strictly in Django, and I've gotten very comfortable coding it. The code is intuitive, the admin pages are pristine, and the speed is quite impressive. I built this entire website in my free time in a little over a week with probably less than 300 lines of code. That includes features like RSS (which takes about 7 lines per feed), spam blocking for comments using Akismet, and all-out tagging. It really makes for some rapid development.
That's it for now. I'll try to do a better writeup on Django when I have a little free time and my mind isn't like mush.
As a side note, I'm probably going to make the code available in the future, but if you'd like to poke around at it before then, send me an email.