Hacking for fun and profit

It has been more than a month since I blogged about Django, the “Web Framework for perfectionists with deadlines”, and the more I use it, the more I know it is the right choice for my web development needs. There is a lot of activity in the project’s trac (this is more important IMHO than activity in the mailing lists ;-)

Some of the big improvements in the last weeks are:

• Internationalization support: both in code and templates.using gettext under the hood.
• A release: Django 0.9 was released this month, this should help people without subversion (or people that don’t know how to use it) installing django.
• More documentation: The documentation has been extended and improved. It is still incomplete, but it is of extremely high quality, probably one of the open source projects with the nicest documentation I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.
• RSS/Atom syndication framework: “Man, it’s so easy it probably shouldn’t even be legal.”
• Pretty error pages: So pretty that now it is nice to have errors in your code ;-)

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Google announced today in google blog Google Analytics, based on Urchin, one of the best (if not the best) traffic analyzers out there.

This is big news because urchin used to cost $199/mo, and now it is free for adsense advertisers and everybody else with at most 5 million page views per month. I guess the guys at webtrends, sitemeter and statcounter are very worried right now.

When I was a kid I read all the encyclopedias in my house. Twice. When I discovered the wikipedia a couple of years ago I was pretty excited about it. Not only because of it’s free content, the fact that anybody can contribute to it, but also because of it’s use of free software.

As of today, the english version of the wikipedia has 807,177 articles. Here I can find info about things I would never see in the Encyclopædia Britannica, like Keyra Agustina, Vampire Watermelons, Fingerskating or the entire plot of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Granted, neither Milton Friedman nor Carl Sagan are Wikipedia colaborators like they were in the Britannica, but it makes a good quick reference anyway.

The wikipedia has seen some explosive growth in the last few years, it has more than 1.8 million articles in more than 100 languages (including my country’s Quechua and aymara).

Everything is powered by Free Software like:

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