Here is a "new and shiney" presentation for running Django on Jython. It's based on my experiences with the DjangoJython tutorial.

As is discussed in the slide deck, and hence the subtitle of the presentation, much could be helped by more careful reading of documentation. Well, moments ago, I decided that I hadn't checked out django-jython 1.1. Well.... turns out many more problems could have been helped by using this later version. Sweet!

At Sort 2009, a technical conference at the LDS Church, I gave a presentation on my favorite all-in-one web framework, Django. It's a great tool, and here's a look at the slides produced to accompany my presentation. Also, checkout bitbucket for the source code for the demo project.

django-admin.py is a utility script that is used by django to start projects, etc. Sometimes, it seems that it's available to me in the terminal. At other times, it melts away, unavailable. So, where is it, and how do I make it findable?

In software development, be dry, and define data once. But, what if that data needs to be used in many places? This is the case with parts of a web page, for instance, that are common to many different pages. Django has a great mechanism for this: it is context processors.

In projects that create project meta data or compiled class files in the same directory as source, svn commits can be particularly cluttered with those files that we really don't care to keep under version control. This is where svn:ignore can beceome our good friend.

The amount of content on the blog and its pages has become substantial (in length only) enough to make it a worthwhile idea to paginate it (spread the content over multiple pages). Django makes it very easy! There are some nice objects available for paginating.

My friend Josh has told me numerous times that Django is much easier to work with on Linux. Basically things are easier if you know how to do them. Whether things are easier to learn or not on Linux compared to other OS's is debatable. But, on this point anyway, it seems that Linux and Django really play well together.

I really need an answer to this question. Why? Because I was, until recently, on the verge of shutting down the comments on the site because of the load of blog spam that I was receiving. It was insufferable. But, luckily, Django came to my rescue again and made a potential solution very pain-free -- except for one problem.

Here are some high-level highlights on what I did to get code highlighting working for the blog. The blog runs on python/django, so this is a very pythonic solution -- which, I have to say, is not a bad solution.