In amongst all the programming (for money), programming (for free), writing a second novel (still not convinced that I'm actually doing that yet but it's a nice journal so I better flaming had be), amateur photography, sleeping, eating and having a life that I seem to be doing at the moment, I'm in the mood for some changes to the site.

So to that end I've got a list of things that I want to change:

1. Style - the templates are dull and boring, even if I did used to think they were quietly understated. They aren't, end of story.
2. More Stuff, dammit! (As in more than just a blog, at least).
3. Integration of external stuff - Flickr, Twitter et. al. - so that you good people don't have to ferret around for it.
4. Possibly - though I'm not sure yet - putting the source up for download so that all you schmuck who want to use the same code that I use can do. Of course, you could also take the opportunity to point out where I went wrong and improve on it, which is also welcome (though don't expect me to always be cheerfully happy about it).

If you've got any ideas that you want to add just drop a comment here.

I have much that I want to blog about but I've had less than eight hours sleep in the last two days and it's making things a bit blurry about now. I will get round to the bit about religion and how it can cause problems in conversation. And now I think I'll shut my eyes and ponder whether or not to integrate Flickr and Twitter and all the other e?rs with the main posts feed on the blog.

Which is probably too much for this time in the morning, but whilst I'm alive I can but think, can't I.

Or I might think about fairy tales. Yes, that seems more likely. 

Thanks all to those people (two, count them) who let me know about the odd site slowdown. My bad; turns out there was a huge-assed query running on every pageload that really didn't need to be there. Excising that and doing a bit of judicious caching has sped things up considerably.

And now, back to our normal programming. 

[Edit]

And yes, I really did post this at that time. 

B.W. McAdams writes to say:

Just to point out, there's been code on the Django Wiki for nearly a year to do XML-RPC:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/XML-RRC

You're quite right Brendan, there has, and it was this code that originally inspired me to create the django_xmlrpc app that I posted about the other day. Unfortunately I didn't acknowledge this fact at the time, mainly because I was surprised to receive an email from someone wanting to use the code and was rushing to get the Google Code and Launchpad projects for it up-to-date, and for that I apologise (I believe that the code on the Django wiki is in fact yours, so please accept the apology on a personal level, too).

The reason that I created a Django app to for handling of XML-RPC requests even though there was already code available for this purpose, is that I'm a glutton for easy-to-reconfigure code. As such, I added the use of XMLRPC_METHODS for defining XML-RPC-exposed functions.

So thanks, Brendan, for pointing out my omission. If there's anything else you spot that could be changed, don't hesitate to let me know.

(Also, your comment highlighted an issue with my comments-handling system, so thanks for that, too.) 

When I first started thinking about re-writing grahambinns.com in Python using the Django framework, one of the things that I knew I wanted to be able to do was make blog posts (amongst other things) using the MetaWeblog API, which is one of the many zillion XML-RPC blog posting APIs that exist out there in the intartubes.

XML-RPC isn't one of the features that Django supports out-of-the-box for fairly obvious reasons; whilst it's not exactly a niche market it is something that needs to be specifically tailored to the sites that use it, so implementing it would exactly be the first priority for the Django cadre.

Because Python already offers some pretty kick-ass XML-RPC library code in the form of xmlrpclib (Python rocks, by the way), which made it easy to implement a simple XML-RPC server myself, I did. And now you can use it, if you want to.

django_xmlrpc (as I've unimaginatively called it) offers a Django app that allows you to expose your functions through XML-RPC. At present it doesn't support introspection, but that's the next aim for it.

You can find django_xmlrpc, along with instructions about how to use it, at its Google Code site (n.b., I'd like to use Launchpad exclusively for this, but for the time being I'm using Google code until I can get round to setting up a wiki and what have you). If you've got any issues, please report them using either Google Code's bug tracker or (for preference) the project's Launchpad bug tracker.

I'm working on making my MetaWeblog implementation a little more generic; more news on that as and when.