Playing with django

Inspired by tales of scalable and robust websites using django and after hearing that Google's app engine would support python and django I decided that I needed to give this language a try.

I am in between homesite engines right now having abandoned both drupal and my mostly useless ruby on rails blog engine typo¹, and I run a homeowners website that is going to be migrating to my hosting package in the near future, so I was looking for something robust, fast, and easy to modify. Allegedly python+django fits the bill, so I have been working to deploy django on my site5 hosting account only to find that damn fcgi isn't as easy as the ubuntu jeos vmware appliance running mod_python. I think that apache virtual hosts are way easier than trying to figure out if touch fcgi is going to work or not.

I set up the vmware player on one machine and after numerous hours of following this guide, (my piss poor spellings fault not the guides) I got mod_python, MySQL, django and nano up and running. Yeah nano, for the simple reason that vim is awful. After getting this appliance up and running I decided to take it home with me, but on fist boot I found that I only had loopback adapter, eth0 was nowhere to be found. I thought that it might be a byproduct of running the vm on a vista machine, but after several reboots of the appliance and a few Google searches I was able to determine that it was actually linux's fault. Apparently it keeps track of the hardware that you have plugged in previously and doesn't take kindly to being moved around. I followed some suggestions from the vmware forum, and was up and running in no time.


¹It appears that after several months of hiding from the rest of the planet, this little blog engine decided to get with the damn program and update. I may go back, I did like the 2.x version I was on, it just wasn't very full featured by the standards of wordpress and the like.