Well, I made my site rewrite live this morning. To force myself to get it done I made the switchover an hour before I had to go catch my plane to PyCon. Sure enough, lots of stuff broke, but I got enough stuff fixed within a half hour to get the site running again.

I rewrote it so I could use Django again. The site was originally Django, but I switched it to my own, middleware-component-architected some months later, which coincided with a move from shared hosting to a VPS. I'm still on the VPS, but decided to rewrite it in Django for a few reasons.

First, when I decided to use the python-markdown2 library for my first rewrite, it didn't have some extensions I was used to - syntax highlighting, footnotes. As such, I hacked it in quickly, but had to depart from the standard Markdown syntax for implementation reasons - for example, footnotes were indented by 2 spaces instead of 4. So, my markdown posts became, well, not markdown anymore. In the meantime, python-markdown2 incorporated those features, and I got tired of maintaining my own local version. So, the first reason was to save some maintenance cost for myself by using the standard python-markdown2.

The next was that, well, I want to do cool stuff. Sessions, for instance, are not cool. And yet, the cost of maintaining my website was largely adding and keeping things like sessions, user accounts, and administrative interfaces working. This is boring work, and someone has to do it. Fortunately, someone is.

And, lastly, I want to develop things that can be used by other people, and vice versa. Like it or not, if I give someone a WSGI application, there is nothing like Django's template tags system, currently, to allow them to embed it right into their website. There are a number of projects to get this done, but they're hobbled by the fact that using WSGI as the common denominator doesn't allow you to specify templating language, or an API for adding things like template tags to that templating language. On the other hand, Django provides standard (and sensible) ways of plugging into many points in the framework API, meaning that, as I develop code - like a Google Charts sparklines API tag - other people can use it as well.

Anyway, the entire source of the site is available here, so have fun and don't be too harsh :D.