Tag: code

You may not notice much, but this blog has been completely rewritten.

I started developing in Django last winter and quickly became smitten with both the Django framework and the Python. Most of the coding I’ve done this year has been in Python. Naturally, I had thoughts of moving this website from Wordpress over to a Django-based blog.

For a while I did nothing about it. Then I had another project come up that required some basic blog functionality be added to a Django-based site. A blog is — or, at least, can be — a fairly simple affair, but before writing my own I decided to look around and see what else was out there. There’s a number of Django-based blogs floating around (Kevin Fricovsky has a list), but few of them jumped out at me. Most were not actively developed and depended on too many stale packages for my taste, or they just had a feature set that I didn’t like.

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Wishlist is a Django application for creating wishlists.

I used Amazon Wishlist for a number of years, but my paranoia finally caught up to me and I decided that I didn’t need to give Amazon that much more information about my interests.

I tried a few substitutes and found that my requirements for a wishlist were less than common. I don’t often use wishlists in the usual way of asking people for gifts on special occasions. Instead, I use wishlists privately to keep track of items that I wish to purchase myself. It helps me to determine savings goals, to track books that I want to read, etc. As such, I usually do not want items on my wishlist to be publicly viewable.

Out of the substitutes I tried, Wishlistr was undoubtedly the best, but there were some aspects of it that I didn’t like. After using it for a while, I decided to write my own app.

As with Gear Tracker, Wishlist is open source. You can get the code on GitHub.

Gear Tracker is an open-source inventory system for wilderness travel gear.

When I first bought my scale, I started a spreadsheet containing the weights of various pieces of gear. It seemed like a good idea — I knew I wanted some sort of database to store my measured weights and other notes in — but I never got around to updating it. Data in a spreadsheet is too static. You can’t do much with it. I think that characteristic contributed to my disinterest with the spreadsheet.

So for a while now I’ve had the idea of writing a web application to track my gear. Over the past week, I finally got around to doing it.

Gear Tracker is built on Django, a web application framework. (If you’re not familiar with Django, and you have anything to do with making websites, it’s probably worth your time to learn a thing or two.)

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