bspace notes

This website is about two months old. I started working on it shortly after a Christmas/New Year's vacation in small but steady increments of early-morning time. So, some of the highlights...

• Set up hosting account with webfaction, because they offer django-hosting via mod-python and were highly recommended by numerous django folk
• Set up domain name bspace.us (.org & .net were taken) with pair.com's domain registration division
• Pointed domain name to hosting site
• Set up django and mysql. My early db training was with postgres, which I'm partial to and which webfaction also offers, but I chose mysql thinking that it would give me experience useful in my work, where we use mysql. However, django abstracts direct database access so successfully that I may switch over to postgres.
• Figured out how to utilize webfaction's tools to set up multiple django projects with subdomains
• Implemented early version of this blog adapting the Simpla theme I had used for an old wordpress.com blog
• Figured out how to set up webfaction static-page serving and point django admin to that, and make this work via https. As an aside, I cannot speak highly enough about the django ssl middleware that allows super-easy specification of pages which should only be able to be accessed via https.
• Added some current content and a bit of old content
• Added 'published' field to allow me to work on in-process articles using the django admin
• Most recently, figured out how to integrate Markdown syntax into django. This allows me to edit a note entry with simple formatting markers which are saved to the database, and on display are automatically converted into appropriate html.

Possible future improvements

I have a couple of other personal projects I want to get to (not to mention the fact that most of my work projects are so compelling that I enjoy working on them at home when time permits) and thought I might put 'notes' development work on hold, but will continue to work on this site through March. The improvements I'm interested in exploring include...

• Adding a comment architecture, possibly with captcha and other anti-comment-spam features
• Implementing long-code css, to enable horizontal scrollbars to appear when a long string of code is entered. This allows page formatting to remain intact, and prevents a user from having to scroll an entire page back and forth horizontally simply because of a single line of long code. (example here)
• Adding a previous-version or two, and enabling a user-friendly 'diff' feature
• Learning about and implementing google analytics
• Learning about and implementing google charting -- for instance, I could have a dynamically-generated pie-chart showing the top tag-areas in which I post
• Learning about and exploring google ads
• Enabling each tag to have its own RSS feed and implementing this with a user-friendly interface
• Experimenting with microformats
• Learning how to most easily incorporate COinS into book mentions. I understand how to use COinS, but would like to learn about the easiest ways to generate them.
• Utilizing django's caching framework

Doubtless I'll think of other interesting work along the way.