Hacking for fun and profit

Update: 0.9.7 released.

Some months ago I wrote about Feedjack, a Django powered Feed agregator. Finally I have decent templates to release it.

You can read all the details or directly download it.

The basic features are (taken from the readme since I’m that lazy):

Like the Planet feed aggregator:

• It downloads feeds and aggregate their contents in a single site
• The new aggregated site has a feed of its own (atom and rss)
• It uses Mark Pilgrim’s excelent FeedParser
• The subscriber list can be exported as OPML and FOAF

But FeedJack also has some advantages:

• It handles historical data, you can read old posts
• It parses a lot more info, including post categories
• It generates pages/feeds with posts of a certain category (example)
• It generates pages/feeds with posts from a certain subscriber (example)
• It generates pages/feeds with posts of a certain category from a certain subcriber (example)
• A cloud tag/folksonomy (hype 2.0 compliant) for every page and every subscriber
• It uses Django templates
• The administration is done via web (using Django’s kickass autogenerated and magical admin site), and can handle multiple planets.
• Extensive use of django’s internal cache engine. Most of the time you will have no database hits when serving pages.

Originally written to be used in ChichaPlanet, it is handling now a lot more planets in the same instance:

• Planet Gnome (mirror)
• Planet Debian (mirror)
• Planet Django (mirror)
• Planet Python (mirror)
• Planet Mozilla (mirror)
• Planet Ubuntu (mirror)
• Planet KDE (mirror)
• Planet Fedora (mirror)
• Planet Debian Perú (mirror)

Share and enjoy.

“Here’s a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer.”

Priceless.

Just some minutes ago, Adrian Holovaty announced that Django’s magical removal branch has been merged to trunk. This means that now the mythical Django-without-the-magic is now the official development version.

We have been using the MR branch in Aureal for almost two months now. The last pre-magic-removal projects were migrated to MR the last week, since we could see that it was very stable. The merging of today just confirms this.

But what does Magic-Removal really mean?

It means mainly removing all the magic modules from django’s models. Also the way the ORM works is even better, and the programmer can do things that couldn’t be possible in pre-MR Django. Sadly, all these changes are backwards incompatible, but I can assure you that migrating a project is very simple, and it’s worth doing it considering the benefits you’ll get.

The Framework is a lot more Pythonic than it was before.

Remember the BDFL’s gripes about Django?

Similarly, I’m not keen on their object-relational mapping approach. There’s too much magic based on name correspondence, and the automatically generated APIs feel a bit unpythonic.

I hope he and all the people that didn’t like all the magic in Django can take another look at the framework, since it is all gone for good now.