LinkBacks and Search Added
Posted in Django
on October 26th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Last night I added the last of the originally-planned features for the infiniterecursion.ca web site. The new features are the linkback system and a Search feature.
The linkbacks are actually refbacks, that is, they rely on the reporting of user agents of the HTTP_REFERER. Every request for a page can potentially create a linkback, with the caveat that certain domains can be blocked, and duplicates are never allowed. We'll see how this goes. All linkbacks are automatically under moderation and need to be explicitly approved, although an autodiscovery function to verify that the link really exists and to get information about the site is available.
Actually, what took the longest with that was that I wanted to create a special administrative area off the site front end for managing moderation and domain blocking using jQuery and heavy with AJAX. In the end I have to say that Django and jQuery played very well together. Thusfar the application is working as expected, although there are some Internet Explorer bugs I need to work through, since I don't have Windows at home for testing.
For Search I decided to go with Google Custom Search instead of rolling my own. Google does a great job and I just don't see the need to expend my site resources and reinvent the wheel to implement this feature - I'm willing to put up with a few ads. Right now I have the search results coming up in an overlay, although I think I'm going to switch to the in-site iframe option.
Note: I did switch to the iframe option. So far I'm happy with it. I wrote a mini-app to handle Google search related stuff. 2009-10-27
I think I will also create a very little Django app to handle the search result page and to give a template for the search box. This could also be handled through the Page app, but I figure why bother jury-rigging when for almost no more work you can get it exactly just so.
This is my first experience with using svn merge --reintegrate. I realise there is a lot of hate for subversion out there, but to be frank, I don't totally get it. At least on the scale I'm working on, Subversion has been easy and helpful. Maybe it doesn't scale well.
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