lennys November 30, 2023

Update

So it's been 2 weeks since my last post. A lot has happened in that time: I finished up my Django & React book (although I still have some bugs to work out), went on vacation to Texas for Thanksgiving, and got eaten alive by some fleas that were hiding in the bedding at my brother's house. They have a couple of cats, and were horrified by my affliction but after a thorough housecleaning all is well. Better me than the kids, I say. All in all, I had a good visit, got to see my extended family and even got my hands dirty working on one of my brother's vehicles. I'll be seeing them again for Christmas at Mom's house in 3 1/2 weeks. Looking forward to it. I found and worked through another online tutorial today. This one was about making Markdown work in a Django project, and was pretty easy. I got it done in just a couple of hours, so now the next step is implementing it on this blog. I'll have to remove Summernote, but I couldn't get that to work anyway so no loss there. I'm doing this because I want to be able to use code highlighting in my posts, plus Markdown can do just about everything Summernote can do just as well. After that, I'm not sure what bells & whistles I want to include in this blog. Time will tell.

lennys November 16, 2023

Website planning, etc.

So I bought another Django book. This one covers Django APIs and React, so I'm hoping I can get something useful out of this one. It's a small book, only has 138 pages, but hopefully it'll cover the meat of the material without any fluff. I'm thinking about going through the Django projects I've done over the last year and trying to fix some bugs in the code. I've covered a lot of ground but still have far to go. I'd like to build another website that uses Django as the backend and something like React for the frontend, but I don't know JavaScript well enough to feel very confident. Hence, the new book. My main website is about 5 months old, and I'm already thinking of ways to improve it and/or replace it entirely. What I'd like it to be in the long-term is a site that hosts my resume, has a small amount of information about me and has links to some of the projects I've built. When I was developing it back in June-July I ran into an issue I couldn't figure out - I created two apps named "Projects" and "Blog", but when I tried to add links to them on the front page Django threw an error. After trying and failing to find a solution, I disabled the links so I could get the site online and have something worthwhile to show off. My LS Enterprises site is just a brochure site that I'm going to build a "Contact Us" page for, with a form people can fill out to send me an email, a working Captcha, maybe a few other things but I'm not planning on putting anything very extensive there unless I figure out a business plan. My other site, trixelated.com, still has the Local Library website I built from the Django tutorial hosted by Mozilla in their developer docs, and other than this blog it's the only fleshed-out site I have at the moment. Eventually I'll replace it with something else, but I have a lot to figure out first, and plenty of other things to do along the way. On a side note, I'm still waiting on the new engine for my truck to get here. I talked with the shop manager on Tuesday and he told me it was on a pallet waiting at some warehouse somewhere, and he'd find out when it would get here on Friday or Monday. I'm really hoping this new engine is in good shape, because I've been through enough nonsense with this truck already. It's cost me a small fortune just to keep it going, and at this point I've spent more money than the truck is worth. I just hope we can get the new engine installed and I can drive the truck for another 3 years, to get my money's worth out of it. Things at work are humming along like usual, it's pretty quiet so I'm able to work on my coding projects and stuff. There are hiccups in the network occasionally but for the most part everything's been fine as far as I know. I hope it stays that way.

lennys November 12, 2023

Thinking about what comes next.

I'm done with my Django for APIs book. It was a good introduction to building an API, but left me wanting more. It's a short book - it only took me 3 days to work through it, and I didn't run into any serious issues along the way. I'm thinking about how to make an API that I can use with this blog somehow, for demonstration purposes. I'd like to find a book about Django that builds just one project and fleshes it out more completely than what the Django books I've read so far do. Django for APIs has a section in which you build a small website using Django as the backend and React for the frontend. I'd like to do more of that kind of thing and learn to develop a website start-to-finish. Before I picked up the Django books I've read recently, I worked through a series of YouTube videos about developing Django websites with Vue as the frontend. Those videos were challenging, as they covered material I hadn't seen before (like serializers), and the "author" went through it at a very fast pace. You can find the videos by going to YouTube and searching for "Code with Stein", he has several videos that cover different projects. I especially liked the one that built an e-commerce website and wanted to take it live on the Web, but sadly the video didn't cover deploying it on a server or hosted service. So I'll have to figure that out on my own, like I had to do when I built this blog. Now I'm left wondering what to do next.

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