Tag Archives: django

Things to do over Christmas

I’ve got about a hundred things that I’d like to get done, and I’ve got a couple of weeks off. There’s lots of family stuff, things to learn about (especially now before classes start up again), and plenty of Christmas traditions, new and old. There aren’t any rules here: categories overlap, things will get added and deleted, and whatever I say goes. I’d better get started.

Family

  • Get to know baby Kaylee
  • Play with Kaylee, Emmy, and their cousins
  • Take Pictures and movies to share with family
  • Have a Wii Bowling Tournament
  • Have a Mario Kart Tournament

Traditions

  • Build a snowman
  • Get up early on Christmas (and wake up Beth if I have to)
  • Watch BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl
  • Crack lots of nuts on Christmas
  • Watch the greatest Christmas movies, including Ernest Saves Christmas, Elf, and Christmas Vacation (and many others, of course).
  • Sleep In
  • Eat Junk food and work on puzzles for New Year’s
  • Take Emmy to see Santa Claus

Learning

Wow, that’s lots to do. I can’t wait. Since classes start next month on the 20th, that gives me one month.

Django From the Ground Up

There’s a cool series of screencasts to watch to learn about building an event website in Django, a web development framework built in Python. The folks at have a rather new site, and the archives just isn’t there yet. This series of screencasts is a great example that has good information for any Django project, so if you want to learn Django in quick, easy lessons, let this be your guide:

  1. Episode 1: Setting Up Version Control
  2. Episode 2: Settings and Models
  3. Episode 3: Why Customize the Manager?
  4. Episode 4: This is the Fun Part (urls, views, templates, and more)
  5. Episode 5: URL Reverse Resolution
  6. Episode 6: Debugging
  7. Episode 7: What’s the Downside?
  8. Episode 8: The Foundation for Social Networking
  9. Episode 9: Reusing a Function to serve customized data
  10. Episode 10: Generic Views and Pagination
  11. Episode 11: Advanced QuerySet Techniques
  12. Episode 12: Adding AJAX
  13. Episode 13: Deployment

I’m a huge fan of Django, but I’ve only had time to work on one site. The best reason to learn how to use Django is that creating websites can be fun again!

Beginning Django

As I move on from the stage of just “getting my feet wet” with the Python-based web framework Django, I’ve found a lot of good resources for learning that weren’t very obvious initially. Although everyone’s case may be different, I’ve found the following strategy to be very helpful for my learning.

Get your hands dirty. After getting a feel for what Django is, start the tutorial. I recommend skipping version 0.96 and going straight to the development version of Django because there have been a lot of exciting new features added since 0.96. As long as I’ve been sure to keep up to date with recent changes, I haven’t had any problems using this development version.

Back up often! Make sure you keep copies of different versions of your files. Doing this will help your programming from the beginning, and it encourages you to improve your code instead of being afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something.

Read the Manual. I admit that I usually don’t understand the things I’ve read in the Django Documentation. However, the more I play around with Django, the more I start to understand in the documentation.

Get to know the community. Subscribe to the Django Community feed and find some authors you like to read. Skim the articles that come across and browse through blog archives for more information on subjects you aren’t familiar with yet. Some of my favorites Django authors are James Bennett and Malcolm Tredinnick, although there are plenty of others worth reading.

Take a look at other’s work. One place to start is the DjangoResources page on the wiki. Find a simple application and open it up – figure out why it works the way it does. There are plenty of places to look for this type, including Django Pluggables and Django Sites.

Don’t be afraid to ask! If you can’t find help on a given topic, try a few web searches. If that doesn’t give you what you’re looking for, ask for help on the django-users mailing list. As you learn more, be sure to give back to the communities that have helped you get to where you are now because there are new users who won’t have your experience, and sometimes freshly-learned information can be easier to share with newbies since you’ve been in their shoes recently.

As Django moves toward a 1.0 release in just a few months, there’s never been a better time to learn Django.

My Django Test Drive

With school out for the summer, I’ve been spending some of my free time learning to program with Django (pronounced JANG-oh — the D is silent) and Python. Over Christmas break I had spent a lot of time playing with Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoyed it, but I made a promise to some friends to try Django before committing to Ruby on Rails. I’m glad I did, because it has been pretty easy and a lot of fun. I’ve done programming for plenty of websites before, and Django took everything I wanted to do and made it much easier. Since I had to pick up Python at the same time I ran into some snags here and there, but I’ve done enough to this point that I wanted to show off my work.

My new site is really just a relaunch of one that I was writing in PHP and never really finished. Quotational.com was supposed to be a quotes database of funny quotes from movies and TV Shows, but I was never able to expand its humble beginnings with just one TV show. Now the new quotational has been live for a few hours and I’ll progressively add features as I learn more about Django. The idea is to get the site out there so I can get some feedback, so if you have any suggestions let me know in the comments. I’ve got plenty of ideas for things to improve, but I’m more likely to work on features suggested in the comments.

So I guess this means I’m semi-committed to Django, right? Well that’s okay, because it’s been a lot of fun and the learning curve hasn’t been too bad. Thanks to the framework makers for making web programming fun again!