Officially Lucky

Django Projects

Over the past few years I’ve been extremely active developing Django applications both on a freelance and personal basis and for my employer, Stone Ward for their clients. Below is a mostly complete listing of those applications and web sites and small description of what they do. Not all of them are publicly accessible so I’ve included screen shots.

Please do not email me requesting the source code for the sites. In almost every case, it is owned by my clients and I have no say over what is done with it.

Freelance, personal, and Pro Bono Work

django-chunks

An extremely simple, open-source Django application that provides facilities for inserting small snippets of content into your Django templates which are manageable from the Django admin interface. Read more about django-chunks.

django-google-analytics

Another simple Django application that allows developers or site managers to attach a Google Analytics code to a site and then insert a small unobtrusive template tag to output the proper HTML and JavaScript codes. Read more about django-google-analytics.

RestrictMiddleware

A simple Django middleware component that allows a developer to restrict access to a Django project to users who have certain IP addresses, HTTP referrers, or special URL codes. Read more about RestrictMiddleware

This blog!

I write about how I built this site in the colophon section.

TruGreen Heroes

An extremely complex, internal employee-outreach program that allowed TruGreen employees to nominate their coworkers for recognition. The finalists were allowed to upload videos they produced with Flip cameras, and all employees could vote on the best videos. Winners were awarded prizes.

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Bridge2Rwanda

A simple CMS site that allows site managers to edit all content via the Django admin application. A robust membership system allows donors or volunteers to sign up for accounts, donate money through a custom payment system, signup for volunteer opportunities and newsletters.

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Arkansas Heart Ball Online Auction

The Arkansas Heart Ball Auction for 2007 was taking place in a physical location in Little Rock and its organizers wanted to conduct an online virtual auction of the pieces prior to the event. The entire site is built in Django and exhibits the pieces as if they were actually in a gallery. Artist profiles and high-resolution art work is displayed in Lightbox-style dialogs. Bidding is conducted through authenticated and semi-verified accounts.

This project makes use of many third party projects including django-registration, typogrify, and django-countries. This piece was designed by Kyle Floyd of Stone Ward and the HTML/CSS development was performed by the excellent Lee Aylward.

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Writers Reports version 2.0

The second version of this website was rewritten from the ground up using Django best practices including generic views, and an extreme adherence to “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (e.g. named views, the {% url %} tag, and more).

A revamped separation of models and a more robust, pluggable web searching system allows for tons more metadata to be pulled in from the web. In fact, this system is so flexible it could theoretically be targeted at any number of online publishing websites.

Other than the behind the scenes coding, the look of the site remained intact, except the use of the light-weight Google Charts API.

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Facebook application: “my iTunes purchases”

This is a Django application built with PyFacebook and DjangoFB libraries provided by the Facebook team. Apple provides an RSS feed of your iTunes Purchases and my Facebook application instructs users how to obtain that feed, and then provide it. The application then regularly checks that feed and updates the user’s profile and mini-feed when new items are purchased. The album art, title, artist, and a link to the iTunes Music Store are listed.

If you’re a registered user on Facebook, you can check out the application page. You can see how the application displays the data in the screen shot above.

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Meineke Thump Bowl (Gaming API):

My most recent Django project was the development of a backend API for the extremely popular online game, Meineke Thump Bowl. The front end was designed by Tim Hicks and developed completely in Flash by Jason Marlin, both of Stone Ward. The flash piece communicates with my backend server using POST requests and returns information in a special XML format. The backend is fairly general and can be reused for almost any online gaming scenario that requires the creation and storage of user accounts, individual games, their associated metadata, the production of high score lists, rankings, and more.

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Ars Technica’s Job Board

The job board is my most visited and widely used site. It is also the site in which I was forced to make darn sure I had my scaling strategy well planned out. On our first day, the site was hit pretty hard and it continues to be beat up on a daily basis, just by the virtue of the property it is featured on. This is the only site on which I currently use memcached and it works beautifully.

The job board is a fully custom application which integrates into two payment processors, Paypal (using their express method) and Authorize.NET using their Advanced Integration Method. It also provides a few standard RSS feeds for the all listings, listings of just certain types of listings, and also search feeds which are essentially infinite. This design for this site is almost entirely done by Aurich Lawson. Most of the CSS was developed by Kurt Mackey of Mubble.

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Ars Technica’s Writers Reports

This is a website that has been in nearly continuous use for over two and half years. It is an internal aggregator for the writers and journalist of a major online technology news site called Ars Technica. It aggregates statistics for over 10,000 distinct articles, reviews, and postings and performs a number of aggregations on that data by specific writer, month, and site section. Each section and author has their monthly production graphed dynamically. This application also monitors other aggregation sites via their APIs when available to give writers a snapshot of a particular article’s popularity (i.e. Technorati, Digg, et cetera).

This is one of the first major projects I undertook with Django and the underlying code reflects that. Not only is it one of my oldest attempts with Django, it has endured at least two major updates to the underlying Django framework. This site was designed by Clint Ecker, but was heavily influenced by Aurich Lawson’s original design for Ars Technica’s main site.

Ars Technica Secret Santa

Ars Technica Secret Santa is a community driven event for the readers and posters of the Ars Technica open forum. It allows forums users to sign up, create a profile, and eventually be anonymously matched with another member that could reside anywhere in the world. The system also allows for regional preferences (i.e. “I only want to be matched with someone in my own country”).

The secret santa application allows for online anonymous messaging between Santa and recipient as well as from recipient to Santa (and reverse) and email notifications. The Ars Technica Secret Santa design, HTML, and CSS was done entirely by Clint Ecker.