I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'django'

September 20, 2008

Introducing the Django Debug Toolbar - SWiK

YES! The best feature of Symfony lovingly ripped off for Django.

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September 18, 2008

DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson

Cal Henderson on “Why I Hate Django”. At last, someone willing to stand up and publicly state the “All serious programming language inventors have BEARDS!” theory. (Some seriously useful performance thoughts mixed in amongst the bile and kittens)

September 12, 2008

Django: the web framework for ponies with magical powers

Django finally has the mascot it deserves.

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September 4, 2008

Django 1.0 release notes

Django hits the big One Point Oh. Congratulations to all involved. I hope to have groovymother switched over to 1.0 this weekend.

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August 18, 2008

BackwardsIncompatibleChanges - Django

Suspect I will be referring to this a lot over the next week or so as I bring my blog code up to snuff with the impending Django 1.0 release. (Currently have 95% working, but the hackedup comments code will take a bit more work…)

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December 16, 2007

The Django Book

The published (but not final — there’s still functionality for comments and improvements) version of The Django Book is up.

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November 23, 2007

django-evolution - Google Code

Work-in-progress project to keep database schemas in sync with changes made to Django models.

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August 21, 2007

livinghardknox: Django and the iPhone

Quick guide to installing ssh, Python and Django on your iPhone, so you can run local webapps. OK, I admit defeat: I’m finally tempted to hack my iPhone and install crap on it!

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July 24, 2007

Django Master Class

Bunch of interesting topics covered at the Django tutorial at OSCON yesterday. I hadn’t heard of Django signals before, but can already think of three hacks in my code that they can replace!

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July 3, 2007

The B-List: Hacking comments without hacking comments

Django project to bulk-up the built-in comments to make them less spammable. I did a bunch of this by hand — good to see it implemented in a shareable manner.

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Now with Django powered goodness!

Antonio Rodriguez of Tabblo switches his blog over to a Django-powered creation. This is a definite trend: Geeks eschewing Wordpress or MovableType for customized Django installs.

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April 24, 2007

Turn your Django application in to an OpenID consumer

Simon Willison’s OpenID consuming middleware for Django. I’ll probably have a stab at mixing this with my blog comments shortly.

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Commentary

Since 99% of what I write here is now in the category of “links” rather than posts, and at the prodding of Mike, I’ve added the ability to comment on links on the site.

Turned out to be about 2 new lines of code and minor templatery tweaks (Thank you Django!)

Go crazy, gang. Feedback-me-do!

January 7, 2007

DjangoID - Trac

Django-based OpenID server. It almost seems daft *not* to be running that here.

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January 4, 2007

The B-List: Django tips: Hacking FreeComment

HOWTO hook Akismet (the anti-comment-spam service) into Django’s built-in commenting. I think I should have commenting for groovymother live by the weekend.

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December 31, 2006

The not-particularly-secret Diary of…

If you’re reading this, then I’ve thrown the switch. After almost five years on Movable Type, I’ve shifted over to some homespun blogging software (which I’ve codenamed threequarters)

The reason for this? Over the last few years, the MovableType “community” has pretty much dried up. While there are still a few souls pushing out plugins, they’re of decreasing quality and usefulness. When you only know enough Perl to be dangerous, hacking around in code to fix the authors’ bugs isn’t much fun, and prevented me from really building anything myself.

So here I am on a site powered by the lovely Django framework. There’s less than 500 lines of my code (templates excepted) powering the whole thing, and very little copying and/or pasting. Finally, I can do crazy things like including my Flickr photos in-line with my main blog entries, all cross-referenced by tags. Madness, I know!

It’s all still a little rough round the edges. There’s probably some Unicode screwups, images might not show up correctly, and I’ve yet to think about comments. But at least now I understand the programming language, and can fix all those things.

Happy new year, everyone!

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December 16, 2006

Finally powered by Django

Simon Willison’s shifted his blog onto a Django-based platform. I think I might have a crack at this myself — The limitations of MovableType (not least the fact that I don’t know Perl terribly well) keep biting me these days. Could be fun to roll-my-own (and a good project for my week off work).

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November 1, 2006

The Django Book

Book about Django, being written in public to encourage peer review. The commenting system is particularly clever.

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August 7, 2006

django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines - Google Video

Google Tech Talk from Jacob of the Django team. Good overview of the origins and philosophy of Django.

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What I Did With My Weekend

Django rocks my world
My IM status, yesterday

I’ve recently been working on a project that exposes a simple web service. When I first wrote the web service last year, the best option to connect Python code to the web had seemed to be mod_python. So I’d knocked up a couple of scripts that parsed URLs and generated POX in a vaguely RESTful manner. Good enough for a prototype.

But now there’s lots of ideas swirling about how this could grow, so I needed something a bit more manageable/scalable/enterprisey.

Earlier this week, I saw the news that there was a new release of Django, a Python webapp framework.

How serendipitous.

So on Tuesday evening I ran through the tutorial, and thought “Oooh!” In much the same way as when I first used the ElementTree XML interface, I had that feeling of “Wow. Finally a framework written by someone whose brain works in the same way as mine.”

I think that’s a good thing.

On Friday, I converted the webservice to use the Django API instead of the mishmash of intertwingled SQL calls it had been. It all worked a treat. Hurrah!

And then over the course of the weekend, I’ve been hacking away, creating a website around my webservice.

Of course, Django’s not perfect. But reassuringly, as I find “holes” and Google for them, I find that there’s plenty of thought being given to them on the Django mailing lists. For example, when I noticed that it wasn’t encoding user-inputs, thereby making it really freaking easy to accidentally expose your site to XSS attacks, I was disappointed. But then I found Simon Willison’s plan for AutoEscaping, along with associated mailing list discussions, and was reassured that this is being thought about, and in a way that will help avoid another magic_quotes-style farrago.

I’m really excited about moving forward with this project, and seeing how far I can stretch Django. If you’re not keen to learn Ruby just to get on Rails, then Django’s a good way to go.

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August 4, 2006

import this. » Blog Archive » HOWTO: Django on Windows

Links to all the pieces you need to get Django up-and-running on Windows. I’ve just started poking at Django, and I’m liking it so far.

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June 6, 2006

Develop for the Web with Django and Python

I’m going to have to give Django another crack some time soon.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.