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It’s Alive…

After many, many, many hours. I have finally arrived at a point where I think this thing is ready to go. The CMS has been completely overhauled to use Django instead of MovableType. I am strongly considering using Django for all future web development for Shelbybark Design.

I still have a few things left to clean up. For instance, I don’t yet have a “contact us” form set up. And that’s something I’m going to want to do very soon.

I am really getting into Django. I can’t say that it’s been the easiest to pick up. I’m a web designer, I’m not a programmer. So there have been many late nights, banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to get things working the way I know that they should.

So, please, look around, I’m sure you will find a few rough edges. Hopefully, I’ll get those polished up nicely before long.

Update

It was late when I wrote this, so I forgot something very important. I especially want to thank Jeff Croft for releasing source code to lost-theories.com. This was very helpful for the development of this site. Also, special thanks to The Falling Bullets website for releasing their source code. This helped immensely on getting my Ma.gnolia feed working. And, based on some things they were doing, I was able to figure out to get my Flickr “date taken” to import to the database correctly.

Thanks, y’all.

About this Entry

Tags

django, web

Date and time

carefully posted Saturday, November 4, 2006, at 11:58 p.m., which was 1 year, 8 months ago.

“It's Alive...” has 14 comments, add yours

Comments

1 On Nov 8, 2006 at 8:32 p.m. Tina said

The album that you are listening to “Mountain Goats” - is that all instrumental?

On Nov 8, 2006 at 9:33 p.m. shelbybark said

No, it’s got words. But they can be very troubling at times.

3 On Nov 9, 2006 at 2:37 p.m. Tina said

I don’t like troubling words. I like troubling music - but not words.

4 On Nov 26, 2006 at 4:45 p.m. Wes said

I saw the photos of you desk. Cool desk.

On Nov 26, 2006 at 10:42 p.m. shelbybark said

Thanks, man. I’m really enjoying it.

6 On Dec 4, 2006 at 3:41 p.m. Michael Hessling said

Which web host are you using?

7 On Dec 5, 2006 at 10:27 a.m. Vernon said

Very nicely done, love your design work! Thought I’d point out a couple of the “rough edges” I noticed, in your portfolio the Javascript pop-up is nice but breaks navigation when clicking on the link to the actual website. Also, the link to the Pacesetter .pdf file is broken.

8 On Dec 5, 2006 at 11:26 a.m. Scott McCracken said

Beautifully done.

Congratulations on redesigning with Django, it’s such an amazing system. I still haven’t been able to figure out how to deal with importing data through APIs like Flickr and Ma.gnolia, I know once I figure one out others will start to make more sense. I’ve seen the code from Fallingbullets.com but still haven’t been able to wrap my head around it, highly frustrating.

Regardless, this is a great design — nice work.

9 On Dec 5, 2006 at 12:23 p.m. Baxter said

Very nice. I like the design quite a bit. If you want some contact form code, drop me a line… I don’t want to put my email address down cause it would be harvested, but you can contact me at gretschpages.com

On Dec 5, 2006 at 10:26 p.m. shelbybark said

Thanks, y’all.

@Michael Hessling - Site5. I’ve been very pleased with the performance.

@Vernon - Thanks for noting those issues, I’ll get those fixed ASAP.

@Scott McCraken - yeah, I’ve had trouble getting my head around it too. The company I officially work for recently purchased Ellington. So, I’ve gotten used to a lot of it through that. I was even able to spend a few days in Lawrence with Jeff, Jacob, Matt, James, and Nathan (all those rock stars :-) ). So, that helped a lot too. Although, I’ve tried to avoid bugging them directly with my personal Django development. Jeff’s lost-theories code and the fallingbullets code were big helps. Oh and there was some info I found here that was helpful too.

@Baxter - Cool. Thanks! I’ll be contacting you soon :-)

11 On Dec 6, 2006 at 2:31 p.m. Adrian Holovaty said

Nice work! It warms my heart to see more and more cool Django-powered sites. :)

On Dec 6, 2006 at 2:41 p.m. shelbybark said

Wow, thanks, Adrian!

13 On Jan 11, 2007 at 7:48 p.m. Daniel Stoddart said

Nice job Steven. I’ve been playing with Django lately but haven’t gone very deep yet.

This just in:

http://www.portablepython.com/

On Jan 11, 2007 at 8:16 p.m. shelbybark said

Hey, thanks, Daniel. It’s good to hear from you.

I’d love to hear how you like it. I’m not a programmer, but I’m trying to learn my way around Python. I’ve had a lot of fun trying to find data that I can munge into Django. I had some fun last week setting up a python script to bring in my LastFM data into Django. The Django part was a breeze, but it took me a while to parse the XML feed since I don’t know very much about programming.

Thanks for the link, I’ll have to look into that.

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