Django People: “Django People lists 2164 Django developers from around the world, in 88 different countries. The aim of the site is to help Django developers find like-minded souls near them, and hopefully kick-start some local meet-ups and user groups.”

Django Pluggables: “One of Django’s great strengths lie in its abundant library of 3rd party “pluggable” applications. Need a blog? Grab a few pluggable apps to get you off your feet. The only problem is… they’re so hard to find and keep track of. That’s what we’re here for. We do the work of making sure you’re keeping your pluggables up-to-date.”

Django Snippets: “…a site for users of the Django web framework to come together and share useful “snippets” of reusable code.”

This happened about a month ago, but somehow I missed it. Adrian posted some info about his (now dead) Chicago Crime website:

It’s with mixed feelings that I announce the end of one of my projects, chicagocrime.org. This site has been serving Chicago residents since May 2005. I hope you’ll indulge me in a brief retrospective.

The site used EC2 which automatically makes it leet in my eyes. Worth reading.

Quoth The Django Book website:

The book is due to be published in December 2007 by Apress, but in the meantime you can read the “beta” book online. The final book will be posted when the print version ships.

Announced back in February 2006 originally with a March 2007 release date, pushed back to June, and now December… so we’ve been waiting for a while on this one. But Apress typically does a good job, so I’m looking forward to it.

Now here’s something that seems unusual… using Django in command-line scripts:

Sometimes, I need to write command-line scripts to populate a database with information from some other source, like a webpage or third-party database. Since Django uses MySQL (among others) for its backend storage, it’s fairly easy to use Perl or any other language for this task. Problem is, it’s very boring and fiddly, so now I tend to use Django instead, which is really easy.

Interesting.

Lon sent me a link (via Pownce, natch) to an interview with Leah Culver about The Making of Pownce. She had nothing but good things to say about Django.

So I signed up for Pownce tonight thanks to an invite from Lon. Unlike the early days of Twitter, the site actually works… which may or may not be related to the fact that it is rumored to run on Django.

Update: Lon discusses the fractured world of social networking.

More: Quoth Nate: “A modern web application without a public API is useless.” Although I think they are working on that.

Quoth Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

I’ve always thought that the sign of a healthy Open Source project is a vibrant ecosystem around that project. That’s why I’ve been thrilled to see that there are a bunch of cool third-party Django add-ons popping up. I thought I’d take a few minutes and give a shout out to some of my favorites…

He lists four projects that sound interesting.

There’s a Django Tagging application over at Google Code that looks interesting:

A generic tagging application for Django projects, which allows association of a number of tags with any Model instance and makes retrieval of tags simple.

Might come in handy.

Big Head Labs has a nice guide to creating a simple blog application with Django. It’s aimed at people with little or no Django experience, but that have a general familiarity with Python. I just skimmed through it so far (having already written a blog in Django), but it looks like it is well written.

I really think that it’s these type of guides (i.e. the really, really, simple ones) that will get more people to check out Django. Nice job!

Nate pointed out a link to the Top 10 Resources for Django-Newbies.

You know, he claims to be all about Ruby and Perl… but I think deep down inside, he wants to code in Python. The sooner he comes to terms with that fact and just admits it, the better off he’ll be. :)