I’ve updated SoccerBlogs, which has been requriing some of my attention for a while now. The obvious change is a much better design, at least as far as my skills go. I also changed how I was linking to external posts and now use a simple ajax request to count click-thrus, instead of more cumbersome, and less SEO friendly, HTTP Redirects.
I’m a bit disappointed how messy I’d let the code become, but taking a look at Pythong’s Django and the Solar Framework for PHP really taught me a lot about how to structure a web application using MVC. My original goals were to reimplement my sites using either Django or Solar, but the slow pace of progress got to me. I’m not blaming either for the slow progress, since among the frameworks I looked at both had really good documentation and user communities behind them. I couldn’t find enough time to really learn either well, and I really wanted to put the apps together in the correct way. I think the need to stick to a framework’s convetions, even when it’d be quicker to hack a solution, requires a lot of patience and discipline.