UPDATE : The position has been filled.

A business associate of mine, based in Bangalore, is looking for a good PHP / MySQL developer for his projects. Please leave a comment here or use the contact form to get in touch with me if you know someone or yourself have some experience in the same. I’ll forward your emails to my business associate and you can take it from there.

Green warriors have their green fitness club. Where? In Spain, in Valdespino de Somoza, in the countryside of Leon. It’s there where some Spanish villagers have built a low-tech green gym area called Lumen. Don’t expect to meet steamy trainers, listen to trendy music, or carry heart beat tracker. There, you get in shape by playing with exercise machines made from a worn car battery, tree branches, boots, rocks or concrete.

There, you essentially learn everything by yourself, by reading the appropriate brochure that bundles the machine. Or if you’re lucky, you could meet the founder of Lumen, Manuel de Arriba Ares, who will show you his “modest knowledge as a professor of physical education”. Of course, exercising in such a place is free. (via microsiervos)

It’s almost nauseating how many frameworks and blogging engines one can choose today. Everything from Ruby on Rails, to SimpleLog and Mephisto, to CakePHP, Expression Engine, the growing Habari Project and even good ‘ol WordPress. All of these contenders (and the loads of others that I haven’t mentioned) have their appealing values, I had reasons, albeit small in most cases against using them. Note that I’ll be intentionally making general assumptions—each tool has their rightful place in different projects, just not in this “exploratory” one.

It wasn’t until I exchanged a few emails with Jeff that my outlook on what Avalonstar could possibly become blew open. WordPress, all of a sudden, felt so, confining. All of a sudden, I had so many ideas related to this blurry new vision. It didn’t have to be just a blog anymore. I could make it whatever I wanted it to be. I just needed to learn how.

Like I had said in my first entry, the extent of my programming knowledge was PHP via my travels with WordPress. So obviously, if WordPress wasn’t going to be my choice anymore, I should have gone with one of the other structured blogging engines right? Well, no, and for a few reasons. The most common was, restriction, as I wasn’t going to leave WordPress for something that… basically worked like WordPress. So with all of the blogging engines out of the way, the only category left contained all of the frameworks.

The Organizational Value of a Framework

When I started planning in mid-April, I wanted to start by rethinking what I could classify as a blog post. More than anything, I had organization on my mind—or keeping fields as “semantic” as possible when related to the content that was to be placed in them. As you know, most blogging systems follow a basic model like this:

• Title
• Excerpt
• Post
• Taxonomy

Sure you could embed videos or different enclosures to vary the uses you’d get out of that model, but when it came to giving each type of post a different design, it didn’t seem very possible with a more structured system (do correct me if there is one that can do this effectively).

This is an early structure diagram for v25. It has since evolved from there to include completely different models for each type of post I plan on doing.

I wanted to be able to specify different models for each type of entry I’d end up writing, each with it’s own set of fields. Let’s jump straight to an example. Below is almost the exact model I’ll be using for when I start including video and screencasts as a part of Avalonstar’s entry routine.

class Videocast(models.Model):
    “””
    A videocast contains an embedded movie and a trasncript, and thus is a video blog post.
    “””

    # Meta
    author              = models.ForeignKey(User)
    headline            = models.CharField(maxlength=200)
    sub_title           = models.CharField(maxlength=250)
    slug                = models.SlugField(prepopulate_from=(‘headline’,), unique_for_date=’pub_date’)
    # Categorization
    tags                = TagField()
    # Dates
    pub_date            = models.DateTimeField(‘Date Published’, default=datetime.now)
    date_created        = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    date_updated        = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
    # Content
    video_link          = models.URLField(verify_exists=True)
    video_download      = models.FileField(upload_to=’/blog/video’)
    transcript          = models.TextField()

You can see that it follows the same basic model, but is specific to this type of content. Each entry would still include the usual author, headline and subtitle. But it will also include fields for a transcript of the video, a field to input the URI of an embedded video (say from, Virb or Viddler) and a field to provide a downloadable version of the video. On top of this anal organizational routine, I would be able to specify a different template to customize the look. When I finally realized I had this flexibility, the possibilities were no longer restricted to the software and the plugins available for it.

The Sexy-ish Automatic Admin

Generating admin sites for your staff or clients to add, change and delete content is tedious work that doesn’t require much creativity. For that reason, Django entirely automates creation of admin interfaces for models.

Getting things “for free” is great for people who have no idea how to program. To be completely honest, this is one of the main reasons I started using Django over the other frameworks. I remember when I had first watched the famous Ruby on Rails “Create a weblog in 15 minutes” screencast, a good half of it is dedicated to the building the blog’s admin system, a very bare-bones admin system at that. Saving me from building the admin system incidentally saved me a lot of development time, and it’s a full-featured admin at that (well, as full-featured as your models get) which is easily extendable. The admin itself is also pretty sexy, but that’s what I say about all of Wilson’s work.

I guess a lot of this is what programmers would call “magic,” but I haven’t gotten that deep into any language to really mind it. :)

Now without Python! Well, not really.

I would classify the building of Avalonstar fitting the old 80/20 paradigm. Eighty percent of the work was completed in twenty percent of the time, and the final twenty percent took the remaining eighty. Other than learning to install Python, I didn’t have to learn much of it until I started creating definitions to make referencing data easier. Like, adding up all the steps in a specific workout or returning a certain string depending on whether variables existed or not. Python also started creeping up on me as I moved into working with views.

If you’re creating something simple, like a blog, with little or no programming knowledge, there are a hell of a lot of resources out there (including source code) to help you on your way. Something that did bother me, was that if you didn’t know how to work with the Python interpreter, a lot of the examples in the Django documentation would fly straight over your head (it all depends on how fast you learn). But again, you won’t be running into too much Python until you start moving into the views and eventually the deployment of your application.

The Templating System

Working with the Django templating system was a pleasant surprise. The whole {% block %}/inheritance system proved to be a very powerful tool in not only creating dynamically generated pages, but dynamic “static” pages as well. Something that I loved when I first started out with WordPress was the fact that you had a header file, a footer file, and files for categories, an individual post and you could include each wherever you wanted (within reason of course). Django’s templating system takes that inheritance power a bit further, allowing you to extend any block you want to. A very simple example would be on my Dance Tracker, where I have the added copyright notice at the bottom. I’ll note that the copyright notice is included in the main template for the dance tracker and references an {% block extra-footer %} that I’ve defined in the main template.

Rather than violating Django’s DRY principle, I’ll leave the subject of template inheritance in the competent hands of a resident expert.

Wasn’t all blue skies and jazz music though.

I admit that I definitely ran into a lot of hard spots with Django, but I was able to find peace and a bit of happiness from working with the framework. The acts of deploying, having to configure Apache, mod_python, installing the numerous libraries proved to be the most nerve-racking. For being the second framework I’ve worked with (CakePHP, working with Jon Snook, was the first), things could have gone a lot worse. But thankfully the community is very helpful and responsive. So even when I couldn’t bother Jeff, I could still find my answer fairly quickly.

I can definitely see myself building a few more applications with Django, and I look forward to chronicling that whenever that time comes.

I need a new brain, I’ve obviously burnt my current one out.

I was looking at some old posts from the past two or three reboots, and I never seem to make these deadlines do I? The eggrolls made their way in a day or so late, and the first Aries Project was late as well. I guess you can’t really set deadlines on sites like these. It’s definitely a lesson learned.

So here I am, stumbling in late to the party wearing a wardrobe I’d rather not be seen in public with. It’s a bit old, a bit used with a few loose seams. Grab me a beer, because I’m going to need it. To tell you the truth, everything was different about this process. First came the application, then the quest to actually see the data on a live site, then the design. The design came last, and I think that’s a large reason of why I think it sucks a bit. It’s very forced, and I don’t know if you can feel it or not stepping around here—but that header is definitely forced. It’s actually reminiscent of versions 19 & 20 (the fruit basket and eggroll versions). The entire site’s also light, which is something I haven’t done in over a year. Everything felt weird, but again, it was part of the whole learning process for me.

(Paragraph removed, please see below.)

Although this site holds the moniker of version 25, I don’t think it deserves it. I’m going build out this site and polish it until I feel happy with it. At this point, I’m going to be content with the site being back up with a mind full of things to write about. I’ve worked so hard on the back-end that it deserves an awesome front-end.

I’ve realized I’ve said it numerous times before, but I ask you once again to bear with me. There is no fanfare following this release, as there shouldn’t be. It’s just a quiet return to normalcy as I await my creativity to do the same.

EDIT: There was a paragraph that talked about how I caved into expectations. But, I’d be deluding myself if I thought that it was because of other people that Avalonstar came out rushed. It was because of me. Jina Bolton and Patrick Haney for instance, told me to wait and take my time. I tried to work on other things. As much as I wanted to wait and take my time, my mind wouldn’t have it. My body wouldn’t let me. My eyes wanted to keep looking at inspiration for potential layouts. On a related note, I missed TV shows I never miss—LOST, Heroes, Mythbusters, etc—because of this. Not because I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t go on with my life until this place was up. If I had waited, I probably would have lost my mind. I refused to touch any client work until I had Avalonstar up. To a point, it’s pretty pathetic. But I hope that serves as some proof of what this place means to me.

Went and picked up the book from the Parel Post Office today.
That’s the postman signing off the book after I paid him 20 bucks because I wasn’t available when he came to drop it off at my home.

The book is lying next to him in brown cardboard.

Patton Oswalt has a new album coming out and I got to listen to the whole thing today and I enjoyed it. I’m going to do something unusual here and post one of the 22 tracks. It’s a two minute riff on the crazy scandals that continue to hit the Bush Administration and it’s the best description I’ve heard for the uncanny talent the White House has for averting one disaster after another.

WebVisions starts tomorrow and I’ve enjoyed the last four of them, so I’ll be around tomorrow and Friday.

I figure I’ll just go to any talk involving Lane Becker and that’s half my schedule booked.

Pretty interesting community story taking place on Digg today (as much as I can gather, after Andre showed me):

• user makes a post on digg linking to the encryption key that is used to crack HD DVD protection
• story is pulled, user is banned, then story goes up about banning user (people speculate it’s because HD DVD was an advertiser) update: Ed Felten has a good post about general efforts to take all references to the key off the web
• Two to three thousand people get annoyed/pissed, and start posting and digging all sorts of stories that mention the encryption key in seemingly innocuous ways.
• This continues for the rest of the day, with the entire front page of the site filled with stories leaking the crack

It’s always fascinating when a community (or a country, or a religion, or a group of any size) decides to spontaneously revolt, and it’s even more interesting when it happens in such a short period of time in a distributed medium like the internet. There are loads of stories like this on other sites and in multiplayer online games but I’ve never seen it happen on digg before. I’m curious how many people it took to come up with a reaction and the idea to post the key in other ways — I can see a general mob voting mentality would be easy to gather steam once the posts were up since many people wanted a way to vent their frustration — but I wonder if it was just a dozen or two users that started creating the posts that quickly got to the front page. And finally, what was their method of communication? In-site messaging? IM?

Anyway, I’m certainly a late comer to this story but I’d love to see a wrap-up of it several days from now, when all the details can be figured out.

When I came back from Austin, I mentioned that I wanted to do a new site focused on business type advice. After a month or so of the idea gelling in my head, I wrote down about 30 ideas for essays I’d like to write, I banged out a mockup, and I looked up a bunch of goofy domains. A couple more weeks passed and thanks to the CSS coding of Ryan Gantz, editing skills of Anil Dash, and the nice fellow that sold me the domain cheap, I give you: fortuitous.

It’s a new essay every Monday about some aspect of business that I’ve learned while running the MetaFilter/PVRblog/etc empire. Nothing too earth shattering, but it’s a fun outlet and I think it’ll help a lot of people in a similar situation out. Subscribe to the feed and follow along.

(btw, the design of the bottom frame CSS hack thing is totally cribbed from NorthTemple and it does display funny if you scroll your mousewheel like mad. It was also the first thing I’ve ever built using Coda as the IDE and it was fantastic, with a little more polish/features it’ll replace Textmate as my editor of choice)