Simon Willison’s Weblog

Finally powered by Django

15th December 2006

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.

Update 13th June 2022: Here’s a snapshot of that new design from the Internet Archive: