Figures this comes out right after I launch my site. After reading up on it, I’m not sure it’d work with what I needed (I have to have variable shipping costs) but I might try it out with another project since it looks simple to use and the extra level of integration looks slick.
Saved for a few projects I’d like to do on this site.
A huge congratulations to everyone involved! For those curious few out there this site is Django powered, and although I haven’t been actively involved in the community or developing with it for all that long, I have to say it’s easily my favorite way to build websites. The freedom and control it provides to get my designs realized quickly hasn’t been possible with anything else I’ve used. With Django I’ve always felt I’ve been doing things “the right way” and to see it at 1.0 is just one more reason to check it out if you haven’t already.
Just what I’ve been looking for. Since I’m still a Django noob whenever I step outside of creating templates, I’ve been needing some good testing environments to start to learn. I’ll be checking these out hopefully in the next few days.
For those of you over in England and are interested in learning Django I can’t recommend this workshop more. Jeff has pretty much taught me everything I know about Django and is an excellent teacher.
After a few comments and now more than a few emails asking me for my Wordpress theme for this site I figured it was high time to explain a bit about how my site works and the concepts behind it.
The idea is a simple one, but with a bit of an over-the-top solution: I just want a personal site that incorporates (go figure) everything I do online (the vast majority of it, anyway). Since new toys pop-up all the time, I want the site to be flexible enough to deal with any new service that I might fancy down the road.
Blogs aren’t enough. People are tweeting, posting photos to Flickr, adding events to Upcoming, bookmarking to Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia and generally just “life streaming.” Each of these has their own community that I enjoy participating in, so I don’t want to abandon them with the hope of trying to build an entirely new audience on my own site. The solution is obvious, bring in all my distributed “stuff” from these services to my personal site.
As some of you might know I’ve got an aversion to social networks, at least ones that are all encompassing, walled garden type sites. Facebook, MySpace, they all just seem there to capitalize on my content: I just don’t want one company to represent all of me online. I love the smaller, content-specific ones. I’m a huge fan of Flickr, definitely enjoy Twitter, and Upcoming is useful for events. Each one is tailored to a specific need I have and meets that need just about perfectly.
Instead, I wanted a place that’s my spot on the web, a personal site. No, not something I had to update in addition to all the other services I use, but something that’s updated whenever I update them. I couldn’t handle the limitations of countless javascript widgets either. I realize it’s a decent solution for a lot of people, but to me it’s sort of the half assed attempt to get the stuff in one spot. The widget is the band-aid to this problem: it’s enough to stop the bleeding, but doesn’t really fix the problem.
I want true separation of presentation and content, and in order to do that API’s were the way to go. Luckily, my new office-mate, Jeff, was working at the time on just such a system in Django and it was perfect. Before working with Jeff I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks with Django tinkering, but after a few explanations and tutorials I was sold. The entire framework was designed for publishing content, in particular, structured data. And that’s just what all this “stuff” I want to collect is: structured data. My photos, links, status updates, and upcoming events are all being stored out there by these services in nice, organized groups, accessible via API’s. Huzzah!
I know, it doesn’t sound appealing: structured data. I doubt it gets many dates, but it’s hot. It’s the same reason many of us care, or at least used to care about web standards: the separation of content and presentation. Poorly structured data hog-ties you to a specific presentation, whereas well-structured data leaves you free to mix-and-match ‘til your heart’s content.
Because I’m tired of hacking. I’ve hacked countless content management systems trying to do what I want, but always only getting “almost there.” I wanted something that’s designed from the ground up to pull in all this data. I didn’t want another blog engine hack, or a tumble log that’s geared towards just tossing the content up as quickly as possible.
Instead, I consider what’s powering this site now to be a personal publishing framework. Not another CMS, but a framework, geared towards the specific purpose of pulling in content from any number of services out there and storing that data locally, in a structured format, so I can display it anyway I see fit. It’s the best of both worlds, community services I can use and participate in, getting all the benefits of their reliability and expertise in handling various content types, but then getting to display and represent the data here on my site to express the myself how I see fit. After all it’s my content.
Honestly, I think this is how all personal sites will eventually end being. Some sort of personal publishing framework that allows you to pull in all your content from a wide array of web services. This site took quite a bit of technical jiggering and a lot of help from Jeff to get it all working, but I see many more tools coming to make this concept a lot easier.
Anyone out there hacking something together to create some sort of personal publishing framework in the interim?
I’ve already got a few ideas already on how I’d like to use these.
A nicely designed Django project repository by Bryan Veloso. I just wish it had search.
Bar charts, timelines, sparklines, oh my. The article by Wilson Miner all about accessible data visualization is chalked full of great ideas and practical ways of implementing them.
Looks like a great way to start hosting something for free just to see where it goes.
Nathan Borror over at Playground Blues talks about how he setup his Django powered site for mobile, and for him that meant an iPhone site. It looks great, and now I just wish I had some snazzy icons like his for my sections.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has created some awesome new template tags for Google Charts. Don’t miss the example page.
Rex Sorgatz does a fantastic job interviewing Adrian Holovaty about EveryBlock. I wish I got to hang out a few more times with Rex before he headed out to NY.
Oh man, I don’t know if I want to dip my feet into YAF (yet another framework) but after reading two articles by designers it gives me hope that this one might actually be easy enough for me to learn.