grahambinns.com

... then the DNS records have propagated correctly and your RSS feed reader is now slurping from the new grahambinns.com server, which is just hunky dory as far as I'm concerned.

I've been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin - which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time - I've also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

• Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I'll be able to license them as I see fit.
• I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I've come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, Wordpress, I'm looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django's markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
• You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
• I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I've gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully - along with an obscure incoming address - stop spammers from doing nasty things.
• The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I've fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site:

• Server: Bytemark virtual server running Ubuntu 8.04.
• Django 0.97-pre (to be upgraded to 1.0 stable when it comes out in September).
• PostgreSQL 8.3 (the migration to which fixed so many problems it's unreal).
• Apache with mod_python for serving the Django stuff.
• Lighttpd for serving the static files.

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).

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.)