jmoiron.net

As you would probably expect with how problematic and generally incomplete it feels, this blog is based upon a long and wretched history of failed or aborted blog projects. Beginning in February 2002, when I wrote far more often about completely uninteresting things (a trend that's caught on with the web at large), this blog has seen 7 past versions:

• 1.0 was a collection of bash scripts to publish to static html
• 2.0 was fairly standard (at the time) framework-less PHP/MySQL site
• 2.1 was a refinement on 2.0, with a transition to using OOP style PHP
• 3.0, my first python site, using a custom mod_python handler & PostgreSQL
• 3.5, a rewrite of 3.0, which saw very little deployment time
• 4.0, first django-based version, about 3 years ago
• 4.1 was a complete rewrite of 4.0 and the launch of the current site style

5.0 is what you see now, on Django 1.0.2 and apache/mod_wsgi. There was also a entirely complete version rewritten using a custom WSGI framework, Mako templates, CouchDB, and Selector but never deployed. 3.5 was the version I mentioned previously that had it's own wiki style creole.

Here's a short rundown of what's new:

• Migrate to Django 1.0
• Todo list (which is still unfinished) migrated to jQuery
• Changed urls.py to use my own custom Selector-style wrapper
• Tags are now generic relations, so they can be applied to other things like gallery(?!) photos
• Deployment via mod_wsgi rather than mod_python
• Deployment environments are virtual (using virtualenv)

Still broken:

• todo list still half broken
• comments still disabled (data model is done)
• gallery still not really started

I have a lot more to write about the general deployment process, some tools I developed to help me out with that, and some configuration gotchas, but I wanted those to stand apart from the site-specific news here!