... me, the site and general fluff...

I’m a 20-something year old geek currently living in Spain, working on a marine networking gig.

I deal with all things technical. From software architecture, through network design, to simple support. My job is varied enough to keep me happy and excited. I would say it was that special once in a lifetime opportunity that I couldn’t pass-up.

Scary thought I know.

My CV is available here and I can be contacted at richard@indigo3.net or +34 608 107 047.

For you recruitment people out there, while I appreciate your consideration, unless you have another amazingly fantastic opportunity that you can guarantee with cold hard cash (and we’re not talking £100 or a pint here), I’m not really looking for employment.

Gotworms.co.uk site

I started this project because I wanted to learn Django a little bit more.

The site is actually 3 parts:

1. Back end data engine which supplies the data
2. The front end interface you see here which renders the data in a variety of formats and handles login/authentication
3. Feed aggregation system based on the absolutely fantastic feedparser

Back-end operations

The backend data engine speaks directly to PostgreSQL and handles stuff like caching, expiration, tagging and filtering based on distribution policy, connected user and a few other factors.

You’re probably thinking that this is a bit overkill for a simple blog, and you’re probably right. That said however, I’m not going to be using this for just my blog. True that’s the driving project, but I’ve already deployed it at my employers for various things.

Front-end

The front end is pure Django and built in the normal way.

Feed-aggregator

Then there’s the feed aggregator, which continually polls various sources for information and aggregates that feed into the main site. I can add an item to a feed manually or wait for it to get polled from the source.

Tagging is special

As I’ve explained elsewhere on the site. I don’t manually tag a thing. I could, if I wanted too, but I rarely see a point.

My tagging uses the Y! Developer API, or more specifically, the Term Extraction API to extract a list of terms from my posts. These are then dumped into a tag list for later use. The result is a totally uniform tagging methodology that doesn’t rely on me being consistent in my tagging.

I have categories for organising my content, tags are used for relevancy.

I’m pondering open sourcing it… Perhaps once I clean it up a bit…