Nathan Hoad

First post! Again...

July 10, 2011

Hurray! This is my blog. I’ve written it in less than a day, using Django. At the moment it’s very limited in terms of functionality, but it does more than enough to function for the time being.

Comments don’t work at the moment, this is because it’s 2AM and I’m about to go to sleep. I expect comments will be working tomorrow! Being new to Django I assumed it wouldn’t have what I needed, so I’ve implemented a Comment model in my models. Just five minutes ago though I’ve discovered FreeComment, so I’ll definitely be using that.

Django is amazing. I’ve transitioned my PHP website to Django in less than one full day. The backend was the “most” complicated part, in that it wasn’t complicated at all. I did feel kind of bad throwing away the backend I’d spent so long developing, however this is much tidier and maintainable. It’s also been a great exercise in just how much time Django saves compared to developing in, say, PHP.

Anyone who wants to tell me how much better Rails is than Django, go right ahead. I agree that Rails is very powerful, but I think it abstracts things a little too much, from what I know. I once worked my way through a Rails tutorial for a blog, with zero Ruby experience. It took me 3-4 commands on a terminal to get a fully functioning blog. That is impressive, in two ways. The first being that you can produce a blog in literally 60 seconds. Development times like that are pretty impressive. The second way of course is that it’s impressive someone would consider a framework like that maintainable. 3-4 commands on a terminal means the “programmer” has seen zero lines of code, and thus of course has zero idea how to maintain the codebase. What if the blog needed tweaking? Fields added, custom views, etc. It would take a lot longer.

Of course, I admit I have very little experience working with Ruby on Rails so my opinion is hardly gospel, but still. 3-4 commands for a blog = long term nightmare.

Anyway, I’m off to bed! Tomorrow, comments will be added. Then I’ll work on RSS, archiving and all the other magic.