Facebook

Facebook’s app is very well designed. It features built in chat, pages, and messaging. The design is very sleek and…

Wait, that’s the Facebook iPhone app.

The Android app for Facebook is poorly designed. Most tasks are handled by launching a browser and displaying the mobile (not touch nor lite) version of Facebook. Android also makes it easily possible to sync your contacts with your Facebook account. Thus Facebook Sync puts people in the awkward situation of contacting a person without having to ask for their number first. When asked where did one get their number from, there is nothing that sounds more stalkerish and creepy than “my phone got it from Facebook.”

Foursquare

As if tweeting about what you are doing wasn’t enough, now you can earn points by going to places for no reason!

I’ll admit that I am addicted to Foursquare. The premise is simple: the user visits a place and checks in. By checking in, they earn points and badges. The person with the most check-ins at a single place is crowned the mayor. All of this is posted to a website for the world to see. You can see my profile here. At the time of this post, I am proud to say that I am the mayor of Five Guys Burgers and Fries and The West Wing.

Foursquare’s Android app is really well designed. It makes use of Android’s location services and gives a reasonably accurate list of venues. I just wish that there was a way to correct locations from the app. Somebody put the Willard Building at the wrong end of Pollock Rd. and it rather irks me.

WordPress

It’s a lot like the iPhone app, and the recent redesign looks great. The design for editing content can be cleaned up some more. Plus, it really should allow for managing more posts along with category and link management. All in all, it’s a good app and it works well.

Warning: Passenger WSGI support is still just proof of concept.  It can break, so be careful.  I have not had any problems yet.

Setting up the account and domain

Before we start installing anything, go into your DreamHost control panel and select the domain you want to install django on (or make a new one).  You have to change the directory from domain to domain/public as this will serve as a base for static files.  Then scroll down a little bit and enable Passenger.

Next, go to your manage users screen and select the user for the domain.  Change the user from an FTP user to a Shell user if you haven’t done so already.

Finally, give DreamHost a few minutes to update their servers and then connect via ssh.  For Mac and Linux users, open a terminal and type:

ssh domain -l username

If you are on Windows, Google the Netspace SSH client or just use PuTTY.  Type in your password and get ready for some shell-based work.  First let’s alter the environment:

echo 'PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib/' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

This will alter your .bash_profile file so your home directory becomes part of your path.

Installing Python

Now, for an easy part, it’s time to download and install Python 2.6.2

wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.6.2/Python-2.6.2.tgz
tar -xzvf Python-2.6.2.tgz
cd Python-2.6.2
./configure --prefix=${HOME}
make
make install
cd ~
rm -rf Python-2.6.2
rm Python-2.6.2.tgz

Not that bad.  Just a few more installations left.

Installing SWIG

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/swig/swig-1.3.40.tar.gz
tar -xvzf swig-1.3.40.tar.gz
cd swig-1.3.40
./configure --prefix=${HOME}
make
make check
make install
cd ~
rm -rf swig-1.3.40
rm swig-1.3.40.tar.gz

Installing setuptools

Now for a useful script, setuptools.  It will help us out really soon.

wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py
rm ez_setup.py

Installing MySQLdb

I’m assuming that you will be using MySQL as a database backend.  This will install the library needed for MySQL.

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/M/MySQL-python/MySQL-python-1.2.3b1.tar.gz
tar -xvzf MySQL-python-1.2.3b1.tar.gz
cd MySQL-python-1.2.3b1.tar.gz
python setup.py install
cd ~
rm -rf MySQL-python-1.2.3b1
rm MySQL-python-1.2.3b1.tar.gz

PIL (Python Imaging Library)

If you want to use any ImageField fields in your database or want to work with images, you have to have this or django will fail when syncing the database.

easy_install --find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging

Setting up django

cd ~/domain
rm -rfv ./*
mkdir public
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django_src
easy_install django_src
rm -rf django_src
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/django
mkdir public/media
ln -s ~/domain/django/contrib/admin/media ~/domain/public/media/admin
django-admin.py startproject project
echo 'import sys, os' > passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'INTERP = "/home/username/bin/python"' >> passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'if sys.executable != INTERP: os.execl(INTERP, INTERP, *sys.argv)' >> passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'sys.path.append("/home/username/domain")' >> passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'os.environ["DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE"] = "project.settings"' >> passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'import django.core.handlers.wsgi' >> passenger_wsgi.py
echo 'application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()' >> passenger_wsgi.py
pkill python

Now visit domain in your webbrowser and you should see a page generated by django. Your media root is /home/username/domain/public/media/ and your media url is http://domain/media/.