Degutis.org

This blog is dead.

For more current news, check out blog.degutis.org. Some say it has changed their lives. Others say it 404s. And some say, if it's a full moon and the day is an odd number and the wind blows in a certain direction, and if you listen very carefully, you can hear that blog whisper "rosebud" under the wind. I've tried this, and have marked it as "cannot reproduce".

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Since Apple announced WWDC, there has been some panic over the Mac platform disappearing or becoming obsolete or a second-rate citizen, or whatever. All this springs from the fact that there are no ADAs listed on Apple's website for the Mac; it only mentions the iPad and iPhone platforms.

Mac OS X isn't going anywhere. Apple's just trying to reshape the computer market, and we don't like it because we've invested a lot of time and energy into the Mac. But whether we like it or not, the Mac is not the most optimal consumer experience for 90% of people out there; the iPad and iPhone in conjunction do a great job handling most tasks we need to accomplish on a regular basis.

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This is the official tutorial on how to use an Apple iPad, for anyone curious.

• Step 1: Turn on your iPad, if the screen is off. You can do this by pressing any physical button on the device (excepting the volume button).
• Step 2: Start using the iPad.
• Step 3: If you are confused on how to accomplish a given task, simply try to do it however it feels most natural. Changes are, the first thing you try will just work. If on your first try, the task is not accomplished, don't panic! This is a good thing; it means the chances are even better that the next thing you try will in fact work, ad infinitum.
• Step 4: Stop using the iPad when you've accomplished your task. This is probably the most difficult step, as the experience of using the iPad encourages more use of the iPad, even when there is no more reason to.

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Just now I added an API to my blog django app, which lets me post from my Mac app.

In fact, I'm posting from it right now. It's freakin sweet.

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It took me a few days to really get this website set up so I can easily develop and deploy, but ultimately I got it working where I can test locally, and when I'm ready to push things to www.degutis.org, I can just type git push web — it's super simple, and who doesn't love super simple?

It was actually pretty simple to get this working. Basically, apache serves my django project at degutis.org via mod_wsgi. There's an extra 2 lines of code in degutis.org's vhost config file which force apache to run my wsgi app in daemon mode, which is convenient because it means all I have to do to reload my django project on my server, is just touch my .wsgi file. So that solves half the battle, the other half being actually pushing source code to my server, and that was only a slight bit tricker.

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A few weeks ago I finally decided to stop putting so much effort into deciding between Python/Django and Ruby/Rails, and to just pick one. So with a flip of a coin, I picked Python+Django and haven't looked back.

This entire site (blog included) was written in a matter of day (in my spare time, even!) using Django. It's ridiculously fun stuff! Django makes writing websites super simple and clean, much nicer than PHP ever was. If I can help it, I won't be touching PHP ever again, in favor of Django+Python!

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