For the past few months, I have been trying out the different schema migration tools for Django. At first, the obvious choice seemed like django-evolution. It was the oldest and the most mature project, and after watching the schema evolution panel from DjangoCon 2008, it was also the one that made most sense in terms of architecture. After working with django-evolution in a few projects though, I found that it did not work well in practice. I have recently been testing South, and it seems like the better choice.
Finally, Django’s recommended deployment method switched from mod_python to mod_wsgi. Updated docs are now online.
In the past few months, sorl.thumbnail has become one of the standard libraries I always include in my Django projects. It’s unobstrusive and very easy to implement into templates, but my one grief with it has been the lack of capability for doing some custom processing on images. As it turns out, sorl actually allows custom processors to be added. When I found out about this feature, I set out to write some for my current project.
I love the Google Maps API, it’s fairly easy to use, well documented, has lots of features to tweak and extend beyond the obvious. However, it’s hefty. The initial load with map assets can easily total 300K, and visibly slow down your site especially if you are providing more than one map on a single page. So, to solve these issues I decided to write a thin layer around the Maps API.
I am currently working on a Django project that will run on FreeBSD when deployed. I had never worked with this distro before, so it took a bit of getting used to, and I ended up reading man pages and Googling mailing list archives until the wee hours of the morning. One issue that really caught me by surprise was recompiling Apache 2.2 with the proxy modules, so I thought I would jot down my notes here.
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