Live on Django

After some weeks of planning (our own site always takes second place to clients) I am happy to say that the holdenweb.com site is up and running on a new host as a Django site. Thanks to all those in the Django community who have provided help and advice over the past few weeks.

During the reorganization we also took the opportunity to polish up our standards compliance, and so as far as I know the whole site is now valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The server also now has a permanent redirect for requests for the www subdomain to the main domain, which will shorten most URLs by four characters and makes us no-www.org compliant at class B.



Not much else has changed yet, though you will notice that reloading a page now typically displays a different book. The next job is to reorganize the URLs, adding redirects for the existing ".html" locations and cleaning them up to be dotless (since there is no longer any static HTML in the site). We are excited by the possibilities.

Before undertaking this modest project I looked quite hard at both TurboGears and Django, and I have to say that both projects are so good the decision was quite difficult. In the end the thing that swung it for me was the ease of migration of the existing templates and database content. Had I been starting from scratch, however, I might have been tempted by TurboGears. I think that Django just fit my brain better on this one.