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In an earlier post, I mentioned about developing a photo-blog in Django. I’m happy to announce that over the last week, I hosted in WebFaction and it is online now.

I realized that hosting Django applications are not that easy – WordPress installation is easy – transfer files; setup some parameters and in about 5 minutes you are up and ready to go. That is the case even for a newbie. However it took me about a week to get this first installation up and running. I was even close to giving up out of frustration.

Good news is that I didn’t give up.

Surely WebFaction, has made Django hosting easier. They have a single-click install of Django – be it with mod_python or with mod_wsgi. You can even choose the trunk version or the official release. Without these it would’ve been a nightmare for newbie like me to host Django applications.

My learning on Django hosting will be another post. This one is about the photo-blog.

As the images are hosted in Flickr, first step is to add Flickr API Key.

Then you start to add photos by providing the Flickr Photo id:

I’m using Beej’s Flickr Python API to connect to Flickr and get information. With the photo id, it will get the EXIF information, photo title, description and tags and store it locally. Once the information is obtained, if needed, it can be changed as well. If the information has to be obtained from Flickr again, just delete the title and it will fire the query again.

That’s all to be done to add a photo!

Coming to the homepage, I’ve designed a very simple homepage. (It shows up messed up in IE; it is ok in Firefox). Most of the part works – browse via tags, comments, about page etc. In the days to come, I want to incorporate the below features:

• Tags as a drop down in browse page
• Email notification of comments
• Comments moderation
• Caching
• Contact form

At this moment, I’m not interested in voting or favorites. But might consider these as add-on features at a later time.

As always the code is hosted in Google hosting. Feel free to browse, comment, code review.