Switching blog software.
Published: 2006-12-25
Category: Tech
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Language: [English]
page views: 449

First of all: Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Gelukkig Kerstfeest.

Now with that out of the way: Since I pretend to know something about computers. It is an insult that my personal Blog run's someone else's software (nucleus at this moment). If it was for being easy to maintain, I just should stop whining and just use Blogger,

I just never found the framework to do it in. I mean, in a fast, fun and comfortable way. Like it should be for something I do in my spare time.

I have been looking at a few frameworks to re-do my Blog in. Basically limiting myself to two languages, PHP and Python.

I always had a weakness for python. It's clean, fast, object oriented and just lots of fun to code. However, it is a general purpose language, so writing a website software in it does mean that you have to handle all the ins and outs. Unless you use a framework that does the nitty-gritty for you.

PHP on the other hand, was designed for webpages, but it's not as clean or simple. Besides, the Object orientation is bolted on top of it. It's just not as much fun to write. The reason I was looking at it, was the quality of some of the frameworks that are available for it. Especially the Symfony framework.

Enter django. A web framework, written in pure python. I have had a blast in the last 2 days learning and re-writing my blog in it. It's fast to write, meaning just enough code to know what's going on, but no repetition, and with surprisingly little magic [1].

So my objectives are: Have all the publicly visible part of the site changed to the new framework before the end of the year, keeping the administrative parts in the old software for now. Maintain the current nucleus data structure. Keep the current URLs working when possible; add redirects when it's not. Change the look to a new template that: "looks nice, clean, xhtml+css based, browser compatible, adaptable by me, and can be used for many types of content."

What is still missing, is: Fixing the look main blog index page; Add the possibility to add comments from a blog article (with spam blocking); Listing articles by category; Adding the atom and RSS feeds.

Once that's done I'll put the new look online.

[1] As many people know, Magic in computers is a bad-thing, since it always breaks at the worst possible moment. The less magic, the better.