Saturday, July 24, 2010

QComicBook 0.6.0 released!

QComicBook 0.6.0 has been released! It doesn't bring all the goodies I planned for this release, but it finally got translations support with 7 languages for starters (Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Ukrainian). See ChangeLog for the list of minor enhancements and fixes in this version. Thanks to all the translators and contributors who made this release possible! Enjoy!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Don't forget to pay your bills...

...otherwise you may face an unwelcome surprise... I forgot to pay the web hosting bill on time, and they temporarily blocked my account. My QComicBook and home web sites were not available for a few days. Dammit.

Monday, July 5, 2010

QComicBook website ported to Django

My new QComicBook website created on January was initially created with Ruby on Rails, but I've recently decided to try out and convert it to Django framework. The main motivation behind this is that Django is Python-based (I still prefer Python over Ruby even though Ruby's syntax is cleaner and better than Python's) and offers a nice administration panel for your website. The fun of learning Django and being able to choose between the two frameworks was also tempting.

Rewriting the website for Django and learning it at the same time took me several hours, but it was worth the effort and I'm very happy with it. The documentation of Django is simply great. Django's philosophy and the approach they take (e.g. when it comes to filters and tags) is very appealing and leads to better separation between model and view. The administration panel fits my needs perfectly and greatly simplifies QComicBook web site updates (this is something the RoR version of the website was lacking; I had a simple "prototype" of the administration page that was a real pain to use). Both frameworks are very good, have similar capabilities and are really friendly and easy to learn (in the basic aspects at least) if you know the associated programming language (Python or Ruby). For now however  I prefer Django!

BTW, the only difference between the old and new QComicBook website that you can spot is the "Powered by Django" phrase at the bottom :)