I've just relaunched the redesign of this site. Nothing major is different, but one fun thing that I'd like to highlight is the way the blogroll is displayed. I got the idea from Motel de Moka, which has more links to work with than I do.
First, I set up a very simple model:
class BlogRollLink(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
date_added = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
url = models.URLField()
But we've got a problem at this point: we can't order this by the number of characters in the name. So we must modify our model to have an integer called name_size, and then override BlogRollLink's save function to fill in that field any time the model is saved. Our final model is below:
class BlogRollLink(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
name_size = models.IntegerField(editable=False)
date_added = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
url = models.URLField()
def save(self):
self.name_size = len(self.name)
super(BlogRollLink, self).save()
def __unicode__(self):
return self.name
def get_absolute_url(self):
return self.url
class Admin:
pass
Now to display this on every page, I've created a context processor named blogroll_processor. It looks like this:
def blogroll_processor(request):
blogrolls = cache.get('blogrolls', None)
if blogrolls == None:
blogrolls = list(BlogRollLink.objects.all().order_by('name_size'))
cache.set('blogrolls', blogrolls)
return {'blogrolls' : blogrolls}
And we're done! A nifty "waterfall" of blogs. Let me know what you think about this technique. Is it stupid?
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