GeoDjango is awesome. It’s one of those frameworks that does an amazing amount of heavy lifting for you behind the scenes so you can just focus on your implementation. There was one thing that has been bugging me about it since day one though: the map picker tool used in the administration area doesn’t focus on your current location automatically. It simply gets initialized somewhere around Cameroon, and you have to pan and zoom your way around the world every time you want to add a single point, or polygon, most likely near where you are.
I have been meaning to develop a simple Django-based wiki solution for a while. I prefer writing my notes and documentation in TextMate using Markdown, and keeping them in a public Git repo. However, I also need to share these files with other people every once in a while, and that’s why I wanted to be able to easily display this content in a wiki-like web site, without having to duplicate data. That’s how Django Doc Wiki was born today.
One issue that I have had with this blog for a while has been the lack of notifications when a new, legitimate comment is posted under one of my articles. I don’t get many comments, but when I do, I would like to be able to respond right away. I don’t like email notifications, so when Prowl was announced this week, I was excited about the possibility of sending push notifications to my iPhone whenever a new comment was posted. It turned out to be much easier than I anticipated, thanks to Jacob Burch’s Prowlpy module and Django’s signals framework.
I just found out about this Django application called django-rosetta that uses the Google AJAX Language API to suggest translations for translatable strings in your project. Even more interesting is the admin-like interface it creates to enter translations directly from a browser - and it doesn’t need any database tables, everything is directly written to translation files. I didn’t try it out yet, but if it works as advertised, it could become one of my default applications.
Tonight was the latest in a series of get togethers among Django developers in the Toronto area. We have been doing these for the past few months, since October 2008, and even though our numbers haven’t grown much, I am pretty sure there are other Djangonauts in Toronto who would be interested. We are planning to do monthly scheduled meetings with proper presentations at the Linux Caffe first Wednesday of every month. So join the mailing list and let’s start organizing!
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