I stayed up a little late last night, because I wanted to get comments working on Linuxlaboratory.org. Comments *are* working, and I *do* get email notification of new comments, which is nice. Akismet is installed, and is no longer throwing errors, but to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to test it. I tried creating a comment that looked like spam, but it got posted publicly anyway. I’ll have to figure out how to log the Akismet processing operations and results.
I also set up email notification not just for comments, but for errors. And once I did that, I started getting slammed with emails. There’s a setting you can use to avoid being emailed for 404 (File Not Found) errors, but the problem I had was that, for every 404 error, there was also a TemplateNotFound error, because there was no 404.html file anywhere. So I created a 404.html file. It extends my base template, so it looks like the rest of the site, complete with the sidebar and stuff, and just has a note letting the user know what happened. This is nice because it’s an opportunity to rescue the user’s session by providing lots of links back to the home page, or to other content on the site. I haven’t gotten to it in the book yet (for those just tuning in, the site is being built in part using the 2nd Edition of “Practical Django Projects”).
Next up is RSS feeds. Once that works I might break from the book, because in the course of looking around and setting things up, I’m discovering that there’s a good bit of functionality I’d like to use, more apps I’d like to plug in, and a couple I’d like to write. I’d also like to put a horizontal navigation bar and make an “Articles” section of the site using a CMS, and have it be separate from the “Blog” part of the site. Then I’ll make a “Tools” section and start coding my own versions of tools like subnet calculators and a “CLI Hacks” application which will let me post one-liners I’ve found useful (kinda like commandlinefu.com).
Who knows what else — but first things first. RSS!