I noticed yesterday as I perused through Djangosites.org, that two northeast ohio sites are django-powered: 1) Vindy.com and 2) Valley24. Both sites are owned by the Vindicator, Youngstown’s local newspaper and were submitted by Jason Holmes, Vindy’s New Media Director.
Django had its roots in the newspaper world, over at the Lawrence Journal Online, and is in use by several newspaper organizations around the country. In particular, one of the founding developers of Django, Adrian Holovaty,worked at the Washington Post (now at Everyblock). Additionally, the Ellington CMS is the commercial product that adds proprietary tools designed for, it appears, newspaper websites. Heck, as I wrote this post I went to djangosites again, and the eight most recent sites are all newspaper sites.
While I was a little disappointed in how poorly both of Vindy’s sites did on html validation, and they could do better on YSlow, the site rendered quickly and with no problems. Except that ad banner at the top. Ugh. Though I’m sure it’s a high revenue generator for the Vindy, it makes me work too hard to get to the content. Perhaps a moot point since I pull it in via a RSS reader. And no, if you are curious, while Vindy is in my personal rss reader, it is not on Planet NEO largely due the restrictive terms of use. Though I guess I could write them and ask for persmission…
I would love to hear Mr. Holmes present at a clepy meeting on the how’s and whyfores(is that even a word!?) of their use of Django. Wouldn’t that be an interesting talk?
I attended my first Cleveland Python User Group (Clepy) meeting today. It was held at BitBackers which has a cool office space. You know they have late nights hacking when there is a shower in the bathroom.
Today, there were about 9 folks, most of whom I know of through their blogs. We had three presenters, giving “lightning talks”. First up was Matt Wilson, of t +1 fame, who presented on screenlets. Screenlets is a cool little way of creating gui widgets for Gnome. Or I guess I should say he demonstrated it on Gnome. It seems it’s work on “Works with any composited X desktop (compiz, xfce4, …) ”
Next up was John Clark(I think that was his last name, my apologies if that’s wrong) who presented guppy-pe. Guppy-pe is a python tool to help find a memory leak in a python application. I downloaded and installed it(easy_install) while he was giving the presentation. I’ll need to look more into this as it may be the perfect tool to figure out if there is anything I can do with Planet NEO‘s memory usage. Interesting that John mentioned he came across it when he was having problems with urlparse, which may be something feedjack has as well. Then again, with 500 feeds to parse, I’m thinking that most likely I’ll just need to place Planet NEO on a box with more memory.
Last up was Christian Wyglendowski who presented a little utility he wrote. Basically what it does is to split off a cpu-intensive call to subprocesses, not threads. In particular, it seems that it really useful in a multi-cpu system, but the laptop he was running the demo on was only a single processor so it didn’t really work to well as a demonstration. However, it was enough to get the idea. This is another one I want to spend some time checking out as it looks real handy.
I was hoping Benjamin Smith was going to show up and do a quick talk on byteflow, but alas he couldn’t make it. But by the time I got home, I saw he had posted a fix to byteflows tag feeds. I’ve already updated by byteflow. Thanks Benjamin!
