django-links

Originally posted · 4 min read

I spent some time yesterday afternoon working on my personal site. I wanted a way to add “related links” for my projects, without hand-editing individual lists in HTML. That’s boring, after all. Surprisingly, I didn’t find an existing django app that did anything like that, and had to build one myself.

My requirements were pretty simple: My site uses codehosting to host project home pages, including file release management, and RSS feeds for updates. I wanted to include related links on the project description pages, so they could link to discussions of the projects on my blog (or other sites).

Rejected Solutions

My first attempt at solving the problem was to modify codehosting to manage the links directly. That worked OK, but felt wrong. I knew I was going to want to have links for other purposes on another, as yet undeveloped, part of the site, and having to manage the links separately would be a pain.

I prototyped a version using JavaScript to render an RSS feed from del.icio.us, but didn’t like the results. I wanted to embed the links instead of requiring a separate iframe. Next, I briefly considered building something combining del.icio.us feeds and feedcache, which would fetch the feeds when the project page was hit, but in-line the results as the template was being rendered. It seemed like (potentially) loading the feed each time anyone hit my projects pages would hurt site response time too much. Storing the links in the database seemed like the best way to go.

Even though it was a simple problem, I went looking for an existing project that did something similar already. I was surprised that I couldn’t find one. I didn’t spend more than 30-45 minutes searching, but I looked at the list of Django-powered sites, which besides full sites includes links to various django-related packages. I also looked around on a few of the blogs I know cover django programming, and of course did a google search. When I found nothing, I assumed that meant the problem was so simple that no one thought they needed to release their code.

It is a simple problem, so I built something simple to solve it (and not being shy about releasing code, am making it available for the next person who comes along). The django-links app defines a trivial model to hold the links, with title, description, and publication date. It provides no UI or syndication features since I didn’t need them, yet. All of the data is entered through the admin interface. It uses django-tagging to define tags for the links, so it is easy to search for links to be associated with a particular codehosting project.

The next step was to update the project details page for codehosting to show the links. That turned out to be fairly simple as well, using a little bit of code like this:

{% tagged_objects project_tag in djangolinks.Link as related_links %}
Related Links

{% endifequal %}

{% for link in related_links %}

{{ link.title }} ({{link.release_date}})

{% if link.description %}
{{link.description}}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

I also updated codehosting to include a TagsField, so the details page can show related projects as well as links. I found instructions for how to build a list of items tagged with all of a set of tags, but there didn’t seem to be an easy way to build a list of objects tagged with at least one of a set of tags using only template language. I suppose that’s the sort of thing that really should be done in a view, so I’ll work that out in Python.

What next?

The next thing I want to do is build a small CLI app to read a del.icio.us feed and add the links to the django-links database. That way I can use del.icio.us instead of the django admin UI to manage the links.

And, of course, I should add at least a minimal view to show all of the available links and a tag cloud. django-tagging includes tools to build those sorts of UI features, so it should be fairly straightforward.