February 10, 2008; 12:00 am
Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic to this page, thanks to Simon Willison linking to me. (Which, in turn, promoted this post on the Django community RSS feed.)
If you were linked to this page and are interested in reading a bit more of the history of this project and a few technical notes about the new site, you should probably start here.
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We launched Friday morning, with an e-mail to our MizzouIT DNS contact to switch our themaneater.com domain over to the new site.
Of course, we just couldn’t have a flawless launch. The site was slow, the site would break (503 Service Unavailable), and it sucked.
Continue reading ‘themaneater.com Launch’
February 7, 2008; 12:53 am
Over a year and a half since I became involved with the online side of the Maneater, I finally feel that this new site project has fought its way out of the jaws of vaporwaredom. Following one false start after another and over a year of high hopes and dashed dreams, I think we have finally accomplished something.
Without further adieu, here is the current URL at which you can test the new Maneater site:
http://www.themaneater.com/
Continue reading ‘Maneater Open Beta (Lessons Part 4)’
February 3, 2008; 10:48 pm
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
This is part three.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
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I’m really going to gloss over the templates and views more than I’d like. Honestly, writing the views was more of a Python learning experience than a Django learning experience.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons, Part 3′
February 3, 2008; 6:17 am
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater Web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
This is part two.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
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Square One
In late December, frustrated with a poor development workflow in Drupal, I mulled it over with Carolina Astrain (our online editor) and decided to go back to Django. I did this on the condition that I could fashion a functional demo in four days or go back to the Drupal project. I promised to have the site (regardless of platform) done by February. A big dare on my part, but necessary in my book: I needed hard deadlines for results. This was getting done whether I liked the workflow or not.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons, Part 2′
February 2, 2008; 8:52 pm
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater Web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
If you’re interested in understanding the history of the project and the underlying technology that powers a fully-functional, cutting-edge newspaper site, then read up. If not, wait ’til the final post Sunday afternoon or evening. To be fair, there’s a chance this ends up being a treatise on why frameworks are awesome and why I like Django so much right now.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons: Part 1 (Prologue)’
