I figured I would write-up some of the features of Django Techblog, the blogging application I wrote to power this site. It does most of what you would expect from a blogging app, but there are a few features that it does differently. The main difference is extended markup, but there are a couple of other features that worthy of note:

• Multi-blog capable. I want to blog on a variety of subjects, but because some of the things I post about (namely the geeky stuff) are only of interest to a select few, I risk turning away visitors who aren't interested in those techy posts. Categories and tags are one solution to this, but I prefer to have a number of blogs under an umbrella blog, each with its own posts, templates and tags. In Techblog, there is also a concept of a channel which appears exactly like a blog from the front-end, but aggregates posts & tags from one or more blogs. In this site, the home-page at / is actually a channel consisting of /blog/tech/ and /blog/personal.
• Microblogging. Techblog has support for Twitter and potentially other microblogging services could be added. You add your twitter account details, which Techblog uses to poll your tweets and automatically post them to a specified blog. It filters out replies because they are rarely of interest to anyone other than who the reply is intended for, and also parses hashtags to create equivalent tags in the blog system. A microblog post can have a unique template (just a Django template) so they can have a different look and feel to regular posts. You can check my tweets in /blog/microblog/.

Getting the Code

The code for Django-techblog is licensed under my politeware license, which means you can use it for any purpose you see fit, but I would appreciate a thank you! It shouldn't be too difficult to set-up if you have worked with Django, but I'd be happy to help if you experience any problems with it. See the Google Code page for the SVN url:

http://code.google.com/p/djangotechblog/