Beyond publishing

This blog has been rather neglected since I moved to DC.

There's been work. And finding an apartment. And adjusting to life on the East Coast. I've also been writing a lot more Python than prose lately, and I'm finding it can be tough to switch cerebral hemispheres on the fly.

I've also been waiting around until I had time to rebuild the blog in Django. This weekend I finally did it.

The back end borrows much from James Bennett's example, Coltraine, with a few hooks on which to hang a couple cool features I've got in the works.

For starters, note the links at the bottom of most posts. Those are part of the blog and part of my larger link stream. That's the advantage of building on top of your own database: everything can be connected. Expect more development along those lines in the future.

Could I have done this in Wordpress? Probably. But I didn't really want to. Building in Wordpress means relying on third-party modules or learning enough PHP to hack a blog platform to do things it wasn't really meant to. Doing it in Django means I get to build what I want exactly like I want.

I don't want to dump on Wordpress too much here. It's a great platform, and for blogging, it's probably the best. Wired uses it (or more accurately, MU). So does the New York Times and plenty of other news organizations, on top of the millions of bloggers.

Wordpress is a great platform for blogging--easy, flexible, with lots of add-ons--but this has never been just a blog. Like I told CLB when I switched from Blogger to Wordpress:

Easy isn't necessarily what I'm going for, though. This blog is partly a learning tool for me, so I'm kinda looking for a more do-it-yourself platform. Basically, I treat this blog like my father treats the house I grew up in: something to be constantly upgraded and meddled with, but never really perfected.

See also:

• In defense of readers
• James Bennett: Minimal
• Latest links

Before: The iTunes for News we have | After: Twenty years