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Content in the Django Category

What's in a Super Simple Post

As I shared yesterday, I wanted to create something that would allow me to post very short posts to my personal blog, but many more options that twitter. Twitter is great, but for this instance it just wouldn't fit the bill.

So I embarked on yet another journey down the path of creating something that I think will change the way I interact with my website ( I do this fairly often). Once I committed my thoughts to making this change, I had to think what a post really consisted of.

Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Super Simple Posting

By now we've all probably seen, read, or use Tumblr. The people that designed that app put a lot of great thought into the usability of their site and bringing design and functionality together. I like the quickness and ease of use, which is why I wanted my "Super Simple CMS" to model those same attributes.

Basically I wanted to start with the simple stuff. That's right I would like my own CMS to be as simple at Tumblr and Twitter. Actually what I want to do is make it easy enough where I could tell someone to post an entry in less than five steps. But in order to do that I need to start slow, and add features as they come along.

Posted: Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Generate Archive List in Django

I wrote a tutorial a while ago in pdf form that walked you through creating a blog with Django. One of the pieces that I left out, was how to use the information in your blog to create a list of available months for an archive. To do this, we are going to use Djangos templatetags. Here is how we do it.

Posted: Saturday, January 02, 2010

I Need A Brand

How often as a web designer do you walk into a brief and potential client says "our brand is important to us"? Almost always right? From the work I have done, the brand is the most important thing out there, especially when it comes to online commerce.

So if branding is important for my clients, why hasn't it been important for me? I've got a Wordpress blog, that I haven't updated since, oh March of 2009. Yup, as sad as that may be, it's sad. Extremely sad, especially since I build custom blogs and websites for people. How pathetic.

Posted: Friday, January 01, 2010

Moving on with TeeShirt Nut

You can see by the picture below, that the content has come along nicely, but there are still some formatting issues that need to take place. What you are seeing below is the before picture. As you'll notice the formatting is way off when it comes to comments.

Posted: Monday, December 14, 2009

E-Commerce with Django

As the year draws to a close, I find myself once again looking at my year long "To Do" list and see a bunch of projects that never got done. Why they didn't get done is anyone's guess. My personal guess would be that I got to busy with clients and never got around to all the personal projects.

One project that I did come across that I think is more than just a personal fun project, is the E-Commerce engine I wanted to build for my T-Shirt site. Currently, my site consists of one lonely entry in a blog and that's about it. No style, no content, and certainly no shirts to sell. In the past I had let Paypal and Google Checkout do all of the order processing for me. I think the site needs a store to go along with the blog and now is an excellent time to talk about building E-Commerce into Django.

Posted: Thursday, December 03, 2009

I feel like a bad host

It feels like it's been forever that I've been here and communicated with you about the projects I'm working on. I even got an email asking "Have you Quit?". No No, quite the opposite actually. I've been so busy that it's hard to find any free time outside of projects and family to dedicate to writing. However, tonight I was able to find that time and jot a few notes down.

So here's an update on how a few of my latest projects are going.

Posted: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Lets Debate This

Finally it's time for something fun. From time to time I get in those friendly arguments with my friends about which of two things are better. You know, Bud Lights better than Coors Light, or Superman could kick the crap out of Spider-man. Whether or not any of this is true, really isn't the point, it's the debate that ensues that generally makes for a good laugh and a heck of an interesting night.

So I thought to myself, why not create a site for me and my friends to post the pieces we feel are debatable. That's right, put our little friendly debates online and see if others agree with us or not. With the power of Django behind us, it really shouldn't be that hard at all. In fact we should have a working example up fairly soon.

Posted: Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Life is Random

Today I thought I would share with you something I did at 10beans.com to generate a random selection of shirts each time someone visited the index page for the site. Basically each time a visitor hits the index page and they are presented with a catalog of shirts, the ...

Posted: Friday, October 02, 2009

404 Pages in Django

While searching this very blog, I noticed something very disturbing that I had never taken care of when building it. I had never integrated the dreaded 404 page. That's right, I had never really thought about what a sly user might be up to when on the site.

Lucky for me I didn't have any really "personal" data out there, but imagine if it was one of my customers websites. That would have looked pretty unprofessional. Luckily Django makes it really easy to create such a page.

Posted: Sunday, September 20, 2009

It's All About the To-Do List

I'm sure you've heard the expression before "So much to do, so little time"? Well this week that is true for me. It already feels like the week is half over and we've only had a one day vacation. The big deal this week is that school starts again, which means the kids go back to school and it's FREEDOM FOR ME. That's right, I get the peace and quite of home again, which means more work is going to get done.

One of the key elements to owning your own business, especially in a tough economy, is that one must be very organized and on top of things. One of the ways I stay organized is through the use of To-Do lists. Yes I know it sounds corny, but I actually still use half a piece of blank paper every day and write down the things I need to.

Posted: Monday, September 07, 2009

Pick A Database Wisely

This week I took on a new client that had begun development of their own Django website, but ran out of internal resources and needed to offload some of the development. Their current site is very static, and has little to no content management behind it, so developing something with Django is a big step up.

One of the first things I noticed was that their current achitecture had SQLite running the backend instead of a more stable database, such as MySQL. It wasn't a production server but it was a live webserver that they intended to make live once the creation of the website was complete.

Posted: Saturday, September 05, 2009

Django ManyToMany

One thing that I think is important when it comes to a CMS, is that the CMS be very user friendly. That means that every little thing counts when it comes to the layout and how each of the data elements fit together. We all know that the Django developers have provided us with a great out-of-the-box solution for entering data in the Django admin. However there is one piece that I'm not to thrilled about, and that's the ManyToMany field.

The ManyToMany field is a great feature, and having the ability to add a new relationship from another models interface, is pretty slick, but I'm not to wild about how long lists are managed.

Posted: Monday, August 31, 2009

Changing the Django Admin

Yesterday I was giving a demo of Django and I got a question that I normally don't get. The question was simple enough, "How did you get the admin to look like that?". Pretty simple question, and one I never really thought to much about. I just kinda do it for each client, meaning that I brand the admin specifically to the clients needs. So what I've decided to do today is explain how I do the most simple branding of all. Change the log in screen and the website name at the top of the admin. In addition to that I'm going to change the color of the admin as well. The nice green and yellow is nice, but I've yet to be at a client where those were the chosen colors.

Posted: Saturday, August 22, 2009

Worthless Stuff

A long time ago in a web design job far far away, I created a website that was just going to be for my personal musing. I basically needed a place to post the things that I find interesting and unique. You know those stories that you just have to send a list of friends via email with your anecdote attached to it.

Right, one of those sites. So I created such a site, and called it Worthless Stuff. I didn't get any more basic than that, it was just worthless stuff that wouldn't enhance your life any. I guess it kinda went really well with my Cynical Tees site. Hmm, maybe that makes me a cynic?

Posted: Saturday, August 01, 2009

Django Admin Is Broken

So I was doing some work with the latest version of Django and found a little error that was pretty simple to fix. When I started the admin for the teeshirtnut.com site, I noticed that the "Change Password", and "Log Out", links were broken. Basically what was happening, was ...

Posted: Saturday, June 13, 2009

We Should Start Getting Nutty

While I wait for my client to get back to me with some contract stuff and some initial requirements, I thought I might start on my TeeNut site. When I start with a website, I like to think of the content I want to produce before I come up with a full blown design.

Starting with a design is something you can do, however I prefer to know the available pieces of content before I start a design. So for this one, I'm going to show you how I created it, from soup to nuts. I thought the nuts thing was rather appropriate.

Posted: Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Build T-Shirt Model

With the framework that I use to build sites ( django ), I start with my drawing, and then move to modeling my data. When I model my data, I usually get out my trusty blank piece of paper and start writing down the things that I think are needed for a particular piece of data. Since we are building a T-Shirt shop, I thought the best place to start would be with the T-Shirt data. That is essentially the bulk of the content for the site.

Here are the things that will be part of every T-Shirt.

Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009