James Tauber's Blog 2007/07


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Atom Format Support Pretty Much Done

Other than:

my implementation of RFC 4287 for Django is pretty much done.

I'll wait to see what feedback I get then will release what I have as 0.1. Of course, there's still the protocol work to do.

An interesting thing I noticed: the code for mapping arbitrary objects to atom feeds is not specific to django at all. So the atom.py module could actually be used entirely independently of django. It's a general atom feed generator for python.

UPDATE (2007-08-01): support for atom:source and checking of co-occurrence constraints is now done.

by : Created on July 31, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 1, 2007 : (permalink)


Finally Working On Django-AtomPub

Almost seven months ago, I posted about my plans to move Demokritos over to Django.

Although Django has some support for the Atom Publishing Format (RFC 4287), it's pretty minimal. You can't produce full-content feeds without some hacking and the more advanced features of Atom are not supported. And Django certainly doesn't have support for the Atom Publishing Protocol, which just got approved as an IETF Proposed Standard.

Back at PyCon, I offered to both complete the implementation of the Atom Publishing Format in Django and also implement the Atom Publishing Protocol. I filed ticket #3569 and ticket #3570 to cover these respectively.

Well five months after PyCon, I've finally got off my butt and started working on it.

This afternoon, I started django-atompub at Google Code.

My approach for completing support for RFC 4287 is to first of all build a test model that covers the data model of RFC 4287 feeds and entries. That's pretty much done now and checked in. Now I just need to work on the AtomFeed object that comes with Django and extend it to cover all aspects of that data model. That shouldn't take too much longer.

Then work can begin on the substantial part of the project: support for APP. With Demokritos I've implemented earlier versions of APP before, but the challenge with Django will be trying to maintain loose coupling between the feed and the user's model. Django's existing syndication support takes the nice approach of allowing arbitrary objects to be exposed as feeds and entries. Making that work the other way around (i.e. creating arbitrary objects via APP) will be challenging but, hopefully, very useful.

UPDATE (2007-07-30): The Atom Publishing Format support is almost done. You can check it out at http://code.google.com/p/django-atompub/ and let me know if you have any feedback.

by : Created on July 29, 2007 : Last modified July 30, 2007 : (permalink)


Potter Prediction Results Are In

Rankings are available at

http://potterpredictions.com/rankings/

but people who haven't completed the seventh book should avoid the rest of the site (you have been warned!)

By weighted score, I ended up 130th. My sister on the other hand ranked 13th.

by : Created on July 28, 2007 : Last modified July 28, 2007 : (permalink)


Facebook

Not that it wasn't already huge, but Facebook seems to be taking off more amongst some of my tribes. If I haven't already sent you an invite and you'd like to connect, look me up!

I've played around with their API a little and it looks promising—expect a Cats or Dogs and Quisition app one of these days.

by : Created on July 22, 2007 : Last modified July 22, 2007 : (permalink)


Multiple Recordings

How many pieces of music do you have multiple recordings of?

In pop/rock, it's mostly limited for me to They Might Be Giants. With 475 TMBG tracks in my library including multiple compilation albums (which probably shouldn't count) that's no surprise. Some of the double-ups are studio versus live versions.

There's a lot of doubling-up on Jazz standards, Mozart and Bach (helped by the fact I have both the complete works of Mozart and Bach as well as many individual recordings).

But what about more than 5 recordings? I can think of only three off the top of my head: two of them are Charlie Parker's Yardbird Suite (my favourite Jazz piece) and Bach's Goldberg Variations (including 3 recordings just of Glenn Gould if you count the Zenph reconstructions).

The third is in a totally different category as I actually have over 10 recordings of it.

It's Prokofiev's D minor Toccata.

by : Created on July 17, 2007 : Last modified July 17, 2007 : (permalink)


Potter Predictions After One Week

Well, it's been exactly a week since I started work on Potter Predictions.

From a development point of view, it's been a big success. I was able to design, implement and deploy everything within 72 hours. Since then I've added numerous features, all of which have been straightforward to implement on top of the existing framework.

So after a week, there are 279 users who have cast 15,078 votes on 154 public predictions. Twice that number of predictions have been submitted, many of which have been rejected as duplicates, some of which I still need to moderate.

Google Analytics suggests there have been 19,361 page views in 1,507 visits from 1,274 unique visitors staying an average of 5 minutes 12 seconds per visit. That means around 22% of visitors sign up for an account.

I paid for Google Adwords for "harry potter predictions" and that yielded 121 clicks from 24,178 impressions on the search page and 475 clicks from 720,224 impressions on the content network. So it appears around half of the unique visitors came from Google Adwords.

In terms of number of users, I have mixed feelings. Things got off to a good start: 100 users on the first day. Another 100 on the second. But then things started to drop off: 50 new users on Friday, 20 new users on Saturday and today is shaping up to only add 10 new users.

A post to alt.fan.harry-potter clearly didn't yield many new users. And my dream of making one of the big Harry Potter sites (which likely would have garnered thousands more visitors, if not users) has not yet come to pass.

But it's hopefully been fun for the users so far. And will be equally so in about a week when the site starts to contain the "answers" to the predictions.

The other nice thing is that the code is reusable, not only for other prediction sites (which I plan to use it for) but also for a number of other sites I have planned in the not-to-distant future. Stay tuned!

UPDATE : It's appropriate that the one week anniversary of one of my more successful (for its age) websites is also the two year anniversary of the framework that made it possible.

by : Created on July 15, 2007 : Last modified July 15, 2007 : (permalink)


Introducing PotterPredictions.com

My new site is

http://potterpredictions.com/

Here's how I describe it on the home page:

This site will let you record your predictions of what will happen (or otherwise be revealed) in the final Harry Potter book.

Then on July 21st, when the book is released, the site will no longer accept predictions. A short time after, results will start to be published here and you'll be able to see how you went.

To compare yourself to your friends, you can form groups and, when the results are revealed, you can see how you went relative to your friends. You will also be able to see how your groups (you can be in more than one) compared to other groups.

We hope that this site will provide a little fun while you wait in anticipation of the final book's release.

Thanks to the amazing development efficiency of Python, Django and WebFaction.com, I was able to get this site launched within 72 hours of conceiving of it. There are still features I want to add, but it's (hopefully) a lot of fun already.

by : Created on July 10, 2007 : Last modified July 10, 2007 : (permalink)


New Site Has to Do With Harry Potter

I promised to give a clue about my new site that I hope to launch tomorrow.

It has to do with Harry Potter, which is why it's so urgent to get out. The site really has two phases in its life: one before the book comes out and one after.

If you'd like to try it out before the launch tomorrow, email me.

by : Created on July 10, 2007 : Last modified July 10, 2007 : (permalink)


Another New Little Site Coming Soon

A couple of hours ago I started work on a new little site which I think will be a lot of fun. It's similar in some respects to Cats or Dogs and, of course, is being written with Django. I hope to have it launched by Tuesday or Wednesday but I'll give a clue tomorrow as to what it's about (and why it's so urgent).

by : Created on July 8, 2007 : Last modified July 8, 2007 : (permalink)


You Me Us We Wins Top 20 Place In Songwriting Contest

Nelson just wrote to me to let me know our song You Me Us We, placed in the Top 20 in the Pop Uptempo / Dance category of the 11th Annual Unisong International Songwriting Contest.

by : Created on July 6, 2007 : Last modified July 6, 2007 : (permalink)