The blog application is finally up and running

What's under the hood?

• django 1.3.1; Stable and no hiccups so far.
• django-articles from codekoala; Took about two hours to integrate the django-articles app into the website. Most work came from HTML template and CSS files. Had to do extra hacks on articles.urls.py and articles.views.py files because I was using the latest django trunk source code and to support the site's navigation menu. django.contrib.syndication.feeds.py seems to be removed from django1.4, I just copied the one from older django release and it fixed the problem. Other than that, I had to register for Twitter and Disqus accounts for the comments API. codekoala is also active in releasing new codes and fixes, so this should not be a bad choice as a blog application.
• running behind FCGI hosted by Site5 (shared hosting); This one was tricky as I had to do kill -9 pid from ps -ef | grep -i django.fcgi several times because new codes have been deployed. Old FCGI processes that have been running on the server will not reload newer .pyc codes, so I actually had to upload the new .py files, delete the old .pyc files and finally kill the fcgi processes running under my user account. It took more time than I expected on the Putty console and doing this late in the evening was a little counter-productive, especially the eyes have been on the computer screen almost the whole day. I still need to remove the Disqus API developer flag and test it again tomorrow.

Reasons I did not choose Wordpress:

• PHP coding requires more keystrokes (shift+4 for $ to declare a variable, -> to access object functions instead of .). Personally, more keystrokes == more bugs in the source codes and I am not a good typist.
• The html template pages on faireweb.com have been "djangofied" when this site was developed initially. That means I either have to port over the current theme to wordpress or choose a new/existing theme. I could have installed a wordpress instance to blog.faireweb.com or www.faireweb.com/blog, but I think it is a bad idea to run and maintain two "similar" things.
• I have full control of the blog application codes in Python.

All in all, this weekend was a productive one. Will try to write and share more from now on. Signing off...