Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/11/20/podjango.html

I had yet to mention in my blog that I now co-host
a podcast at SFLC.
I found myself, as we launched the podcast last week, in a classic hacker
situation of having one project demand the need to write code for a
tangentially related project.

Specifically, we needed a way to easily publish show notes and
otherwise make available the podcast on the website and in RSS feeds.
Fortunately, we already had a few applications we’d written using Django. I looked briefly at django podcast, but
the interface was a bit complicated, and I didn’t like its (over)use of
templates to do most of the RSS feeding.

The small blogging application we’d hacked up for this blog was so
close to what we needed, that I simply decided to fork it and make it into
a small podcast publisher. It worked out well, and I’ve now launched a Free Software
project called podjango under the AGPLv3.

Most of the existing code will be quite obvious to any Django hacker.
The only interesting thing to note is that I made some serious effort for
the RSS
feeds. First, I heavily fleshed out the
minimal example for an iTunesFeed generator in the Django
documentation. It’s currently a bit specific to this podcast, but should be
easily abstracted. I did a good amount of research on the needed fields
for the iTunes
RSS and Media RSS
and what should be in them. (Those feedforall.com tutorials appear to be
the best I could find on this.)

Second, I did about six hours of work to build what I called SFLC’s ominbus RSS feed.
The most effort went into building an RSS feed that includes disparate
Django application components, but this
thread on query set manipulation from django-users referenced from Michael
Angela’s blog was very helpful. I was glad, actually, that the
ultimate solution centered around complicated features of Python. Being
an old-school Perl hacker, I love when the solution is obvious once you
learn a feature of the language that you didn’t know before. (Is that the
definition of programming language snobbery? 😉

It also turns out that Fabian
Scherschel (aka fabsh) had started working on on a Django podcast
application too, and he’s going to merge in his efforts with podjango. I
preemptively apologize publicly, BTW, that I didn’t reach out to the
django-podcast guys before starting a new project. However, I’m sure
fabsh and I both would be happy to cooperate with them if they want to try
to merge the codebases (although I don’t want to use a non-Free software
platform like Google Code to host any project I work on ;). Anyway, I
really think RSS feeds should be implemented using generators in Python
code rather than in templates, though, and I think the user interface
should be abstracted away from as many details for the DTD fields as
possible. Thus, it may turn out that we and django-podcast have
incompatible design goals.

Anyway, I hope the code we’ve released is useful, and I’m glad for
Fabian to take over as project lead. I need to move onto other projects,
and hope that others will be interested in generalizing and improving the
code under Fab’s leadership. I’m happy to help it along.