This blog is now my first public site that I've built with the Python programming language and Django web framework. I needed some motivation to build a project that I could show people, so for the last week or so I've used a few bits of my personal time to build a Django-powered replacement for my WordPress / PHP blog. Django has proved to be simpler and more powerful than I had guessed. I spent likely no more than 15 or 20 hours total working on it, including time spent creating the style sheet and writing a database migration to get my old posts, categories, and comments into the new database.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, and missing a lot of the features of WordPress, but that just gives me things to work on when I'm on the bus to and from work (where most of the code for this blog was written.) I haven't added category pages, just the front page with the latest 10 posts, individual pages for each post with working comments (all comments are moderated for the time being so they will not show up right away), a sitemap.xml file for google's sake, and an RSS Feed.

Again, I've decided to shy away from Apache, even though it is the "easy" way to deploy webpages, especially Django apps. For the WordPress version of the blog, I had been running Nginx on the front, delegating requests to php-cgi instances. I kept Nginx as the frontend server, so all static files are served super fast, and regular page requests are proxied to a Tornado instance. It's bloody fast--even on this $10 a month VPS, and I'm not caching anything, yet. I'm using Supervisor to manage my Tornado script.

I know some things are broken, like images on old posts. I'll get to those, eventually. It's enough that I got it running for right now.