LinuxLaboratory.org Django Update

Posted on by bkjones

Hi all,

So, I’ve begun down the road of reinventing LinuxLaboratory.org using Django. For the moment, I’m mostly starting out using the blog application from the newly released second edition of “Practical Django Projects”, and there’s no CSS or fancy design going on yet, but I have a nice admin interface for creating posts, managing categories and tags, etc., and I’ve created some basic templates that do enough that I can see things working.

I will eventually add all of the old content (mostly system administration and scripting articles I wrote for O’Reilly, Linux.com, and others over the years) back into the site, but I started with the blog so that I could share my progress and (when I enable comments) get feedback and tips as I move along.

There’s no RSS feed yet, either, but that’s coming as well. You can follow along for the moment by just going to the site, or I’ll post short summaries of what’s going on here.

  • http://serverhorror.wordpress.com Martin

    Hi,

    how about regularly making some screenshots (and post them!)…I really like looking at the progress you make. Kind of gives me an idea how long I’ll need for it 🙂

  • m0j0

    In the time it would take to post screenshots, I could whip through another 10 pages in the book. Looked at another way, it’s the time it would take 10 people to read this post and just go to the site. The screen shots are not of any real value anyway — it’s the clicking around that gives you an idea of the progress. Oh how I wish I could send screen shots to clients and get them to just sign off on my deliverables!

  • http://serverhorror.wordpress.com Martin

    Well I’m not thinking about screenshots of every page, but given the progress (from plain black on white HTML) to a somewhat readable CSS layout is great.

    Having screenshots (from time to time) pointing out the most notable changes would provide a timeline kind of view.

    As far as value goes: Of course the screenshots have value it provides potential customers with insight how you work, how “fast” (if that is measurable for a spare time project) you are and in this special case as you are actually working thru a book how much you like to experiment and how those turn out.

    Put aside commercial value, it’ll always be a great motivation to see how far you got with just a short skim over the posts tagged with “progress” (btw, you are still missing the tags feature from the book – I have it too) 🙂

  • http://serverhorror.wordpress.com Martin

    Since I just saw it. Do yourself a favor and disable the debug stuff on your webserver…

  • m0j0

    The tags feature from the book is giving me big problems. Is it me, or is there no clear explanation of how tag attributes and data are going to be accessed by the templates and used? I’m all the way through chapter 6 and starting chapter 7. I don’t generally have an issue with the “ok, we did it twice, now you figure out the others that need to be created” style of teaching (in fact, I like it, and use it in my own training courses), but being that the django-tagging stuff is quite different from the others, I would’ve expected a bit more guidance.

    For example, maybe I missed something, but I initially had the error “tagging/tag_list.html template not found”. So I had to put the right template_name in the proper dictionary inside my urls/tags.py file to get it to work.

    I stopped to do some work with templates for presenting the tag lists. I decided I wanted a page that listed all of the tags, and for each tag, list all of the things that are tagged with that tag. This is not as straightforward to me as I had expected. Reading the tagging/models.py and some of the docs were helpful, but now it seems that I just don’t have the proper objects being passed to my template, so I guess I have to write a view function or something to get things in the right place, because just using what’s given to you when you follow the book doesn’t even give me access to the TagManager methods I’d need to pull it off.

    Hate to rant. I’m learning a lot, and things are going more quickly than I would’ve expected, but I just hit the “tag” wall today and my head hurts. It’s possible I missed a couple of things in the book, too, in which case, I’m happy to be corrected. 🙁

  • m0j0

    Yeah, disabled it, but now I need to find out where/if that debug information is logged, and if not, I need to know how to get it to log and *not* print to the output in the browser.

    It would’ve been nice if there was more test/debug content *throughout* the book instead of just tacking on a chapter about it.