OpenIDFinally powered by Django
It’s been way too long, but I’ve finally replaced the ball of PHP duct tape that has run this site for the past four years with a shiny new blog engine powered by Django.
I’ve moved to my own domain (simonwillison.net) on a virtual server hosted by Bytemark. I’d like to extend a big thanks to Incutio for hosting me for the past four years. Moving a site that’s been around for this long is going to be pretty painful; if you’ve linked to me in the past I’d appreciate it if you could update the link. I’ll be adding redirects from the old site once I’ve seen how well the new system copes with proper traffic.
I’ve also redesigned (feed readers, click here now!). One of the biggest problems with my old design was that it emphasized my entries which were posted only a few times a month at the expense of links, updated several times a day. The new front page emphasizes both, with a much clearer indication of when new content has been added.
Unfortunately this means my feeds are moving. I’m serving the new ones through FeedBurner, but I’ve shelled out for a vanity subdomain so at least they stay within my domain space. You can subscribe to everything (links and entries), just the entries or just the links.
I’ve opened comments on links and expanded the format to directly display my commentary rather than hiding it in a tooltip. I’ve always liked the way Matt Mullenweg and John Gruber write short-form entries around their links and hope to start doing something similar here.
Finally, I’ve imported my photos and sets from Flickr. I haven’t posted anything there in a little while, but you can see an example of the integration on the archive page for 6th January 2005.
I’m still taking the bubble wrap off things, so please tell me if you spot any bugs.
Kick ass!
I gotta say I'm a big fan of the new look, Simon -- but where's Beaker? I miss him :)
Jacob Kaplan-Moss - 15th December 2006 14:56 - #
I liked Beaker too, poor fella..
zedzdead - 15th December 2006 15:17 - #
Very nice, Simon. I like the "2002 2003 2004" etc in the footer.
John Zeratsky - 15th December 2006 15:23 - #
Nice! Like the footer, too.
Manuzhai - 15th December 2006 15:25 - #
Beaker is indeed a loss, but we must move on, I guess. Count me with the others in praise of the new site, Simon.
Derek Willis - 15th December 2006 15:28 - #
Nice new design. Less green :-)
I like the idea of comments on the links and the archive being in the footer, might just nick that. Possibly needs a new favicon, though.
Aquarion - 15th December 2006 15:29 - #
Just made a server/domain switch myself (haven't fixed the design yet). It isn't always an easy process getting everything moved over and in place. Glad you got everything up and running on the new server. How are you setting up your redirects from the other site?
Nate K - 15th December 2006 15:32 - #
Sam Ruby - 15th December 2006 15:52 - #
Sam: thanks for the catch; adding that now.
Simon Willison - 15th December 2006 16:02 - #
Nice redesign! But the entries rss feed seem unavailable (404) ?
phil - 15th December 2006 16:31 - #
phil: what's the link that's 404ing? The feeds are working for me.
Simon Willison - 15th December 2006 16:35 - #
I'm sorry too to lose Beaker and the green, but it's nice to see you finally caught up with the times and rolled yourself a Django blog! ;)
How's Bytemark for Django hosting?
Wilson Miner - 15th December 2006 16:39 - #
At last, but where's the colophon? :)
Loving this sticky-floaty comments box. I expect the javascript's relatively simple (too lazy to look). Would make for an interesting entry though hint hint...
James Wheare - 15th December 2006 17:01 - #
Cool. Didn't know today was an official switch-to-django day ;-)
Fredrik - 15th December 2006 18:02 - #
Well, someone's gotta ask it, I guess, so here it goes:
where's the code? :-)
Nicola (a Roman friend of yours)
Nicola Larosa - 15th December 2006 20:41 - #
I second Nicola's question...
Where is the Django code for this app?
BinnyVA - 16th December 2006 02:48 - #
Nice, Simon, congratulations. This will surely inspire others to convert those "I wish this site were..." buttons into action.
Paul - 16th December 2006 04:49 - #
Great to see it live! I smell an underground Greasemonkey script coming on for The Fans of Beaker.
Drew McLellan - 16th December 2006 11:21 - #
Nice, simple and effective redesign, well done !
The flickr integration is pretty cool too.
Now I really feel guilty for not doing something with django yet ...
Cyril Doussin - 16th December 2006 13:20 - #
I've subscribed to the articles + links feed with bloglines and I keep getting all of your links each time you post a new one. Something off in your handling of handling of the HTTP conditional headers?
I would find this immensely funny since the rss feed for my blog is generated based on PHP code for handling HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE, etc that you posted on your old blog!
I do like the new look though and envy you doing more stuff with python... One of these days...
metapundit - 16th December 2006 20:46 - #
metapundit: I made a couple of changes to that RSS feed in the last 24 hours which might have caused all of the items in it to appear as new. Tell me if the problem persists - from my tests it seems to be working as it should now. FeedBurner should be handling the IF_MODIFIED_SINCE stuff for me.
Simon Willison - 16th December 2006 21:43 - #
Please update your rss address on Django | Community
http://www.djangoproject.com/community/
Alvin - 17th December 2006 18:01 - #
Simon, why the choice of NET as your TLD in spite of RFC 1591?
"This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD)."
Noah Slater - 18th December 2006 16:38 - #
RFC1591 is rather antiquated and doesn't hold much water. As TLD registration restrictions weren't properly enforced for COM, NET and ORG, 1591 is effectively meaningless.
It's certainly possible to regulate registrations effectively, as many international registries have proved.
Drew McLellan - 19th December 2006 09:44 - #
Drew, while I was aware it is something frequently ignored, I thought it was simply best practice to use the TLDs as was originally intended.
Any other behavior simply compounds the problem.
Noah Slater - 19th December 2006 11:14 - #
Well, actually, I don't really find black on white very inviting to read and also don't like blue and purple combination ;-) sorry.
But I guess it's more about good content here ;-)
Sam - 19th December 2006 12:24 - #
Having the most recent comments appear in the sidebar on the home page would be a useful addition IMHO. Or at least a recent comments feed.
Congratulations on the move, and merry Christmas :)
Kickass! Took a few tweaks (due to a tiny error in phpMyID) but it finally worked.
Third-ed (from Nicola and BinyyVA)... will we see the code for your blog? I wouldn't mind toying with a Django-powered blog on my Dreamhost account.
Shawn Wheatley - 27th December 2006 18:27 - #
Hi Simon, Here's another vote of approval of the re-design of your site! As some others said above, I hope you share your code so we can all learn and easily create our own Django-based blog-type things. I'm considering Django and also re-thinking my OS. I've been a FreeBSD person, but I'm thinking of switching to Linux -- which flavor of Linux are you using why did you choose it rather than another OS? Thank you for your nicely designed site and very interesting posts!
Nancy McGough - 30th December 2006 12:33 - #
I wasn't convinced by other projects like Karrigell since I came recently to Python from PHP and do not like any more mixing code and output format. I'm gonna take a look at Django, looks really great. Hope it's fast too.
I'm using Firefox 1.0.7 without extensions not user style sheets at the moment and the comment form overlapped with the first comments. I disabled the styles (that is great with CSS), signed in (my first comment ever with OpenID, thanks to your article), enabled the style and all is right.
I really like the nice colors here, but I strongly dislike the fixed width. Having to read one ten-centimeter-wide column scrolling on four screens is a bit painful.
I tried to use the correct em dash but faced three errors ( with the character, with the entity reference and with the numeral entity reference). Perhaps nobody cares about em dashes but me.
The sort of fixed comment box is really cool (though if I were on my computer I'd be typing in a text editor, not in the text area (hum,
httpslinks forbidden ?)), even if it doesn't follow when I use the mouse wheel. The preview is as great. And all that without a single warning in the JavaScript console -- but that didn't surprised me.it's realy look great :-)
parisnajd - 28th April 2007 23:43 - #
This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD)
vimax - 19th June 2007 15:36 - #
regdbcvb - 20th June 2007 02:01 - #