dcinput daily for Sun 22nd Jul, 2007
Turning dcinput to a Python weblog
I’ve found Worpress more than sufficient for all my blogging needs up until now. It was the obvious choice to make after my Blogger weblog since I wanted to host the site myself. The fantastic plugins and big community just made the choice easier. The plan had always been to start learning PHP and customise the site to my needs. The reality is that there never seems to be enough time to get anywhere useful with that idea.
I’ve been programming in Python for around 4 years now. I had coded in C++ and Java back at university but when I started working at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop all the code that they used for scripting the pipeline was in Python and various shell languages. Of course a lot of the image processing code was in C but I was always much more interested in glueing things together.
That’s what I do now. I write code to glue lots of different technologies together. I look at people’s workflows, at the software they are using and I come up with ways to automate repetitive and error prone things in the media making pipeline. It can be pretty frustrating at times but with persistence I always get there in the end. It’s also a very creative role. I’m constantly thinking of new possiblities, new ways of combining things that weren’t meant to be combined. I’m told this is hacking.
While I do lots of back end scripting I really haven’t had a go at programming for the web. Unfortunately it just hasn’t been needed in my job. That’s a big downside. Anyway I’ve decided I want complete control over my blog, I want to be able to try things out at a moments notice. I also have a few other projects that are web based that I want to get going. Over the comming weeks I will be moving this weblog to a Python solution.
I’m tring to choose between Django and Turbogears.
Django and Turbogears reading
Erik Smartt on moving from Wordpress to a Django blogging solution.
Python blogging software links.
Gustavo Picón on why he chose Django over Turbogears and Ruby on Rails.
Thread from the Turbogears Google group in response to Gustavo.
I’m going to do the tutorial in both Django and Turbogears and see what I like best.
Django notes…
In about an hour I’ve managed to get a page up with Django, though most of the messing around was due to my dodgy mysql installation. Seems to be pretty straight forward so far. I will document my voyage.
MySQL installation instructions on OSX, came in handy.
Resetting your password on a MySQL installation. I had to use the insecure method. I should really write passwords down.