Instead of studying for my CS Theory final, I thought it would be a better use of my time to add a "Contact," page for this site. I'm not sure if that was the best idea in the world, but I've still got 3 days until the exam. :P

Anways, it's something I've wanted to add for a week or two now. The more I've been using Django, I've really grown to love it more and more. Using all their fun tools for forms made adding user generated content much simplier. I remember years ago working in PHP this stuff. It wasn't too bad, but it was a lot more... manual.

If you want to shoot me a message, you can do so here.

Something that I've wanted to add to this blog was a pagination feature, but I didn't see the need for it now because I only had a few posts. But it's now added and enabled. By default, I have it showing only five posts per page. One of the reason why I love Django is because of its pagination tool, which really makes my life easier. You can see the paginator in the upper right hand corner of the blog. I might move the location later on, but it looks nice and cosy right up there.

I actually had the update done before the end of last weekend, but I was a little lazy on uploading it to my webserver. As for future stuff, I'm going to get a contact page up soon as well as some more tutorials/walkthroughs.

So for the past couple of days I've had a little break, so I decided to write a tutorial/walkthrough on how to deploy Django with Apache & mod_wsgi. When deploying the Python/Django port of my blog, I found it wasn't easy to do. My issue was that there weren't any tutorials online that walked you through all of the steps; all of the information seemed to be scatered. So I decided to write my own. If you're interested, you can find it under the "Pages," section (or here is a direct link).

On top of that too, I decided to add in Markdown support for content here. I was going to install CKEditor but I figured Markdown was simple and quick enough. Normally I would go over to the CKEditor Demo and write my content in there, then paste it into a text box here, but this is much more convient to do. On top of that, I added an extra thing that will let me chose whether I want to work with straight up HTML or Markdown syntax.

Over the past week I've had some free time, so I decided to do something I wanted to do: move this website over to a Python based system.  The weekend before the last, I spent some time in a car ride learning the Django framework and really fell in love with it.  The old CMS script was something written using PHP and the CodeIgniter framework.  I spent the better part of 3-4 days porting over the code, and about 3 days getting the server setup and web app deployed. The only thing that I lost was the "1st," "2nd," "3rd," "[4-0]th," endings on the date.

I might later make a post talking about the pros and cons of using each but in a nutshell this was my experience:

Since Django deployment was such a pain for me, yet I figured it out, I'll be posting a tutorial soon on how to do it.

So for my first site updated, I decided to add in a "pages," section.

If you're wondering what is the purpose of having a separate section for something like this, I've got two reasons:

1. It's for content that I don't feel is necessary for my blog here.
2. I want it to have a different style, and making a separate section is a lot simplier.

There isn't any content there yet.  I'll need to find something to write about first. :P