Ayman Hourieh

I've been meaning to migrate my website from Drupal to Django for a very long time. Although Drupal is an excellent content management system, I got tired of working with PHP every time I wanted to add a feature or make a change. My previous web host didn't support Python so I had to stick with PHP. Recently however, I moved the website to a VPS at Linode and decided to migrate to Django as well.

Writing a blog application in Django took very little time thanks to the reusable apps that come with Django, like syndication, comments and admin. I also had to port the blog design to Django templates and migrate the content from HTML to Markdown. I've been using Markdown at StackOverflow and I really like it. It's concise, readable and much easier to work with in a text editor than HTML. I wrote a small script to convert existing articles from the subset of HTML that I was using to Markdown.

To run the website, I'm using Apache2/mod_wsgi for the backend, and nginx as a frontend. I chose mod_wsgi because it's very flexible. As for nginx, I chose it because it integrates nicely with StaticGenerator, a Django middleware that caches pages as files on local disk. StaticGenerator has an important advantage over using Memcached with Django: cached pages are served by nginx without hitting Django at all, so it's much faster. A quick benchmark on my setup showed that it was 8 times faster. StaticGenerator can only cache full pages, but this is fine for my needs.

The blog feed now contains full articles (as opposed to short summaries). This should be more convenient to those who read the blog via the feed.