thanks django syndication
I've added an rss feed to the site, since every good blog really needs a way for people to keep track of it... I would forget more than half of the blogs that I regularly read if not for the google reader item I see every morning on my homepage. Of course, this isn't an rss feed rolled from scratch. The minutiate of writing and testing your very own xml creation is not very much fun. Xml is a necessary evil in many cases, but I try to stay on the parsing side of things whenever possible. I have many thanks to give to the Django Syndication Framework.

The question this brings to mind is - If I'm trying to learn python through django, how much of the code should I be writing from scratch and how much of it should be contributed add ons? Tough question. From what I gather, a lot of python coding is "from x import y". I watched a talk from PyCon where Steve, who wrote reddit (twice) talked about how every time they need something new, they use the standard python implementation until such a time as they either need or have time to roll their own version of a feature. For me, up to this point, included stuff seems to be a good way to get past the stuff with annoying implementations: rss and comments so far. I'm thinking I can revisit the stuff I want to learn more in depth once I get past the "need to get done" stuff for the site. So far, even implementing the included stuff has taught me a ton.

Next post: django database migrations and the advantages of knowing another framework