I’ve recently learned that I have a bunch of options available to me to play with my web site… and so much more. My interests in keeping my blog up are more for playing with web technology than anything else. I had learned quite a lot in building it, which turned out to be highly beneficial when taking on new responsibilities at my work. A few years later, I am now ready to grow a bit more. Given that my budget is modest for, my goals will be to pursue some of my nontrivial interests (time permitting as usual) in as robust and minimalistic as I can manage.
My shared hosting provider Webfaction has generously upped the resources provided to their base shared hosting offering such that there is now a LOT of memory made available to run applications. Now I can entertain running things like a JVM if I so desire. I will not complain for getting more for my money!
I have had to change my ISP provider from DSL to cable modem due to insufficient bandwidth. I didn’t get remotely near the advertised bandwidth from the DSL provider because my residence is too far away from the switch. So, for a little more money, I now have a 13x faster network connection and as an added bonus, am able to connect to my machine from the outside world. Maybe I’ll be able to set up some distributed computing between my home machine and my shared hosting provider. Now, if only I can find a reason to implement such a thing…
I’ve learned of Scalate which is capable of generating web sites as static HTML. That is, you build your predominantly read-only site as you would for a dynamic one, and instead of deploying a runtime, you “compile” your sources into static content to be delivered cheaply. I’ve been looking for quite some time for a good solution for managing my personal notes. Tomboy isn’t as portable as I’d like, a wiki requires a network connection, I need to support both Windows and Linux, and would like good version management of my changes for historical purposes. Writing my notes in Markdown format and checking into a distributed VCS (Mercurial or Git) for distribution, versioning, and maybe even deployment.
I now have some more experience with integrating web assets served by separate technologies into a unified site through some browser magic. This should allow different solutions to run at the same time instead of pulling/porting everything under a single technology as I have done in the past.
What is wrong with Django?
In short, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Django. In fact, I still find it to be an extremely flexible, powerful and not to difficult to grok framework. I still like it quite a bit, though I’ve not been able to keep up with the latest developments. I find that the way my site is currently set up, I have to intentionally spend time to add anything to the site, which I never do. I would prefer turning the site into a tool I can use on a daily basis for tracking things I find interesting. Then, maybe I’ll actually keep it up to date, and make use of the site I’m paying good money to play with. I’ve not fully committed myself to moving my blog off of Django just yet. Doing so would mean abandoning the comments feature, though admittedly I don’t get many comments beyond those of an undesirable nature. As a result, I’ve taken to disabling comments to cut down on moderator notifications and save database space.
Conclusion
So, my plan going forward is to pursue a more heterogeneous collection of components that are selected and/or designed to work together. I trend toward low maintenance solutions that either satisfy a need or simply tickle my fancy. After all, this is my playground for exploration and skill development.