A month in review

I've now been blogging for 30 days in a row, so tonight is just going to be a simple post to finish the month of. First of all, WOW, another month of blogging every day completed. This month was great fun, and I managaged to keep the bullshit filler posts to a minimum (3 or 4 by my count). I also finished the month with 42700 total hits (easily a record), including hitting reddit and Hacker News several times. It's been great fun writing every night, hopefully I'll be able to keep up the regular posts, but for now I plan on taking a nice long nap, then I'll get back to the requests.

Just a Small Update

Unfortunately, I don't have an interesting, contentful post today. Just a small update about this blog instead. I now have a small widget on the right hand side where you can enter topics you'd like to hear about. I don't always have a good idea of what readers are interested in, and far too often I reject blog post ideas because I think either, "no one cares about that" or "everyone always knows that" so hopefully this will be both a good way for me to write interesting content that people want to read about, as well as a good way for me to overcome any writers block. So please submit anything you'd like to hear about, Python, Django, the web, programming in general, compilers, or me ranting about politics, I'm willing to consider any topic.

To my American readers: Happy Thanksgiving!

My Next Blog

I've been using this Blogspot powered blog for over a year now, and it is starting to get a little long in the tooth. Therefore I've been planning on moving to a new, shinny, blog of my own in the coming months. Specifically it's going to be my goal to get myself 100% migrated over my winter break. Therefore I've started building myself a list of features I want:

• Able to migrate all my old posts. This isn't going to be a huge deal, but it has to happen as I have quite a few posts I don't want to lose.
• Accepts restructured text. I'm sick of writing my posts in reST and then converting it into HTML for Blogspot.
• Pretty code highlighting.
• Disqus for comments. I don't want to have to deal with spam or anything else, let users post with Disqus and they can deal with all the trouble.
• Looks decent. Design is a huge weak point for me, so most of my time is going to be dedicated to this I think.
• Django powered!

That's my pony list thus far. There's a good bet I'll use django-mingus since I've hear such good things about it, but for now I'm just dreaming of being able to write these posts in reST.

Another month of blogging?

Last year I started this blog during the November, blog every day for a month month. This year I'm hoping to repeat the feat, blogging every single day this month. Today's post is a bit light on content, but I'm hoping to give a preview of what I'm going to be blogging about. This month I'm hopping to blog about advanced Django techniques, Comet (and other HTTP push technology), and I'm probably going to be adding some more political content to the usual technical content of this blog.

Lastly, I'm hoping to move this blog either to another hosted provider, or something on my own servers, but somewhere where I can get a tad bit more control.

In any event here's to a productive month of bloggging!

2008 and 2009

Eric Florenzano recently wrote an excellent post titled, "2008 in Review & 2009 Goals". I am now going to blantly steal his idea.

2008:

• Joined Twitter
• Voted for the first time
• Had a blast at PyCon
• Wrote a reusable Django application and open sourced it
• Learned git
• Got accepted at, and began studying Computer Science at RPI
• Wrote a blog post every day for 30 days in a row
• Started work on my programming language, Al
• Contributed heavily to Django
  
• Started a blog
  
• Proposed a panel for PyCon 2009 and was accepted

And probably quite a bit more.

2009:

• Continue work on Al, bring it up to a usable state
• Continue writing on my blog
  
• Propose a talk for another conference
  
• Continue contributing to Django
• Become a committer on one of the projects I use
• Do something interesting over the summer, hopefully a cool internship or Google Summer of Code
• Do well in class

In light of all the stuff that happened in 2008 I hope these are reasonable goals.

A month in review

Today is the last day of blogging every day for a month. It was harder than I expected, but I ultimately made it, which also surprised me. For my last post(of the month) I figured I'd share some stats about the blog from the month.

• About 10k visitors and 13k page views
• My 3 post popular posts were "What Python learned from Economics", "How the heck do Django Models Work", and "A Timeline View in Django"
• My top 3 referers were reddit, ycombinator, and the Django project site.
• Top search keyword was "django models"
• 2/3 of my viewers were using Firefox
• Under 3% IE(yay)
• 28% were Linux users

I don't think I'll ever blog this frequently again(at least not until next November), however I hope to continue writing fairly frequently and I have at least two more posts planned for December.

Some thoughts on Blogging

As we come to the close of November, I thought I'd take a comment to reflect on blogging. For one, this is by far more writing than I've ever done. Also, who thought blog-everyday-month should be November, Thanksgiving at the end really makes it hard to finish strong. Right now I'm pretty brain dry, hopefully I'll think of something good to finish off the month. For now I'm just trying to enjoy the long weekend.

I should probably take a chance to say thanks to Brian Rosner, Michael Trier, and anyone else who wouldn't stop pestering me to get a blog.