baratrion

UPDATE: This blog no longer runs on Mingus.

I’ve been working diligently over the past weeks on my fork of Django-Mingus which is a Django powered blog engine incase you don’t know.

Mingus is really a good initiative even though every dude and dudette in Djangosphere has experienced this.

But the important aspect of Mingus, for me, that it is a clear, concrete example of how you can quickly get up and running with many awesome reusable Django applications out there. Mingus itself doesn’t define any models. I think it’s an amazing playground for Django newbies¹. Distributed development -new and sleek code hosting sites as well- made a huge impact on new plugables being emerged and shared. Django documentation’s been always superb, but you can also learn a lot from existing applications now.

If you think your learning curve is still steep, you’re doing it wrong.

So, what did I add to Mingus codebase? A lot stuff. But namely, there are two different main RSS feeds: one for all entries (bookmarks, quotes, posts) and one for just blog posts, a saner tag detail page, get_post_archive template tag, a tag cloud, better share this section, typogrify, smartypants, poor man’s related (similar) posts…

If you are using a modern browser (modern as Firefox² > 3.5, Safari > 3.1, Opera > 10) you should also notice a different thing in the look & feel.

I’m using @font-face rule to embed Graublau Sans Web in this website. I think it’s looking purdy comparing to other fonts we’re used to seeing on web. And you know why I have chosen Graublau? Well, first it supports Turkish characters. Second,

WE CAN FUCKING USE IT

(And for those who didn’t get the point.)

I also migrated my old Wordpress blog’s data into Mingus, there were actually a lot of practical stuff I didn’t like about Wordpress, first one still is, it’s being PHP.

I cancelled my account on (mt) and got a slice and setup the environment from scratch. I don’t have any familiarity with that kind of stuff in any sense but everything went seamless, but I needed last retouches of our omniscient, ninja sysadmin. I learned a lot stuff about deployment processes, how it can be less painful and automated etc. virtualenv and pip is a killer combo. In the end, I’m not gonna be a freaky sys ninja, but I could be a good apprentice.

I’m also caching, gzipping, compressing, squating, sitting up, pushing up to save the bandwidth and I’m scoring 98 on the latest YSlow with the Small Site or Blog ruleset. Hello 33.6Kbps guy, welcome back.

Hope this will motivate me to write more about Django, Python and everything.