April 9, 2008
Startups launch left and right (Hell I plan to launch my own in the next few months!) but a lot of them don’t stick out. Clickpass.com is one of those that sticks out for me, but has been kind of flying under the radar lately.Clickpass allows you to use a single login for all your sites. It’s basically OpenID, but they’ve done it right and have actually made OpenID very easy to use. Even a few of my friends who could never “get” OpenID because it was just a hassle to work with, loved ClickPass.
So far with Clickpass, I am only using it on HackerNews which makes it kind of pointless for me as I am still having to log in, but currently no other sites I frequently use Clickpass, which is one downfall of it. Adoption for it is slow, but hopefully it picks up.
What’s great about Clickpass is once I’m logged in, all I have to do is click the “Clickpass Enter” button on any supported site and I will be logged in, no need to retype information. Additionally, I can mange my details and avatar straight from Clickpass without having to deal with multiple sites.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned above the adoption is slow. Despite a story on TechCrunch and some initial media, it’s now kind of flying under the radar. I haven’t seen any sites added to the supported sites list in the past few weeks and I hope that they get some more adopters.
Needless to say, I know when I launch my own user-oriented site, I will be supporting Clickpass. It makes sense from a user standpoint and as long as the user isn’t confused, which Clickpass does very well in not doing, then it works very well.
Either way, check out Clickpass.com and see what they have to offer. You can also integrate it into your own blog (I will when I actually update to Wordpress 2.5)!
February 8, 2008
As of yesterday, I completed my first Django app. Django is a high-level Python web framework designed for rapid development and quick deployment. Did it deliver? Oh god yes.
Coming into this project, my Python skill was hurting. I had not written a real Python application in a few months and before that, I never had a solid grasp of Python to begin with.
So why did Django make me so happy? First off, in a weeks time, a few hours here and there throughout the week, I managed to: Create a fully functional website with ability to add new posts (Along with card specials, release schedules), polls, a simple member registration, and of course a fully functional admin panel that made it easy for my client to add content to their site. I did this all, with no knowledge of Django before hand!
Some highlights of the Django framework:
- Installing and configuring Django takes about 15 minutes for a newbie. Download the project from SVN (At this point in its development, this is a good idea), untar it, modify some settings and you’re golden
- Setting up a project is simple with manage.py, the core of Django’s management capabilities. Setup the project, then setup your first app, and within a minute you are ready to fly.
- For each application, Django creates a views.py, models.py and urls.py. These three files are the core of your program and it makes it super easy. Define your table and any core functions in models.py for that application (Ie: News Posts app), setup the templates you will pump out in views.py, and urls.py is if you want to get down and dirty with url structures.
- syncdb and django admin are amazing. I cannot stress this enough. Define your models in models.py, run syncdb and all your tables (including multi-relational ones!), primary keys, etc are ALL CREATED! I love it!
- Once all your tables are created, login to Django admin and you have full functionality to play with all your data. If you setup a DateTime variable in your model, the admin displays that field with a nice Javascript calendar popup.
- Python is a sexy language that you will love the more you use it. When I first began playing with Python it was ok, kind of cool, but nothing amazing. The more I learn about Python, the more I love it. I’ve used PHP for years and I honestly can’t bare to look at it after working with Python in the past few months.
There’s a reason why companies like Google and NASA have adopted some of their technologies around Python, because it is code sex. Yes, I like that term.
To try out Django, check out these resources:
- The official Django project site has a great documentation and beginners tutorial.
- The B-List has some good code example and tutorials for Python/Django.
- #django on irc.freenode.net has some great people. Magus- is a total dick, but very helpful
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