Ok, so now LinuxLaboratory has the following features working:
- comments (along with comment moderation and akismet support),
- a WYSIWYG editor for my posts
- markdown support for comments
- email notification of errors and new comments
- a full-blown administration interface that lets me deal with any apps, users, or content on my site,
- some cheesy CSS (hey, it’s better than black-on-white, at least IMHO)
- an RSS feed
- sidebar content that includes information about the current content, and links to other recent content on the site.
- Maybe some other stuff I’ve forgotten. It’s late.
There’s only one RSS feed available at the moment, and I’m not linking to it because the URL will likely change and then I’ll have people all pissed at me, or worse, not subscribed to the feed. I’ll set up FeedBurner on it and post that URL when I get it set up. This way, if my feed URL changes, I can change it in the FeedBurner setup, and everyone else just subscribes using the FeedBurner URL. Handy.
I’m veering away from the book for some of this stuff. For those who weren’t following along, this is all being done with Django, and I’ve been using the 2nd Edition of Practical Django Projects to help me along both in getting this thing built, and in learning more about Django. I use Python for everything else — why not the web?
Anyway, I’m jumping around the book at this point, taking bits from various parts of the first 7 chapters, checking out the official django docs, looking at lots and lots of articles on blogs all over the place, and putting things together the way I want them. For now, I just want a stupid-dumb RSS feed. I’ll get to doing category-specific feeds and Atom feeds later (I also want comment feeds, and one of those cool things that links tweets about the post into the comment thread and stuff).
For now, I also just want a blog, and I’ll get to the CMS later. In fact, through the building of the blog application I’ve become pretty confident, so I’ll probably grab bits from the CMS and the Code Sharing application in the book and put something together that makes sense for my needs.