After several weeks of working on my own stuff, I spent most of this week doing something for myself I really enjoyed. Imagine! Enjoying myself in my own time! Not saddling myself with a really dull and laborious task!
I’ve been wanting to get to grips with Django for ages. Over the past year or two I’ve worked through a couple of tutorial books, read a few blogs, and written a couple of small things in plain old Python (which is also new to me). But have failed to start work on a Django site.
Part of this is due to a phobia of starting new sites which probably stems from running Pepys’ Diary. I fear starting something that will require large chunks of my time for several years to come. And so I’ve been put off starting anything new. It’s silly, this paralysis, but there we go.
This week though I started re-writing my own site in Django. This is also silly especially as I’m not, yet, aiming to do anything except exactly replicate its current features. It’s a lot of effort for no visible gain, aside from developing my own skills. However, the current site is a lumpy mixture of Movable Type and PHP which gets more convoluted with every new addition, and puts me off doing new things with it. I’d like to unify the weblog and all the data-gathering stuff into one interface and codebase, to make it easier to experiment with what I think personal websites should be like. Replicating an existing site also means I can concentrate on learning the code, without simultaneously spending too much time agonising over how a brand new site should function.
I may never finish of course. It’s a surprisingly big project and it’s slow going. Many problems of the “How do I do x in Django?” variety have me Googling and experimenting for a couple of hours before realising there’s a very simple solution. So I may get part-way through before deciding that’s enough of this, and I should move on to making something new with Django. But either way, I’m really enjoying Django and having the time to experiment like this.
In the world of, you know, paying work, various projects are hovering around being vague. All being well a fantastic one will be finalised this coming week, and I had to turn down another which would have clashed with it.
Onward, people, onward!
Commenting is disabled on posts once they’re 30 days old.
