Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Plan…inaction?

Just a quick update to my previous post. Basically, three and a half months later, I have made it through half of my plan. There is a laundry list of legitimate and b.s. personal reasons why it took so long, but they don’t matter now.

As of last night I have successfully deployed a Django-based website onto my webserver. It is currently too ugly to even share a link to, but the sense of accomplishment is great nonetheless.

The big frightening part of web development that I never understood before diving in was how difficult it is to actually deploy something beyond HTML/CSS/JS. Want to learn Rails? Read some tutorials, you’ll be running locally in no time, developing your first projects and seeing the results in real-time, it’s a great thing. Want to take that project and deploy it onto the webserver you are already paying for? Well, are you sure you don’t just want to use Heroku? Are you really sure? There are dozens of tutorials out there for that? No, you don’t want to pay another hosting site? Okay then, good luck.

That was my experience, with Django, but I briefly dabbled in Rails tutorials and found it to be a similar issue. I use Dreamhost and there are a few scattered tutorials on how to deploy a Django project onto Dreamhost, but none of them were complete or exactly matched my needs. It is one of those things you can look back on with fondness: you spent three nights trying to deploy, which sucked, but now you are much more familiar with Django and your own webserver. A necessary evil, I suppose.

Perhaps I’ll get around to creating a tutorial with my Django on Dreamhost experience, but I’ll save that for another day.

Up next: Cleaning up my project so it’s presentable to the outside world.