Images all ready
I now have images uploaded in a nice thumbnailed, paginated and searchable way! Aside from wanting to tweak some layout issues, I think it's pretty good.
There was workable code on this site to upload images and it worked. But I wasn't terribly happy with what I had implemented myself. So, I did take the lazy option and used sorl-thumbnail which works very well. The thumbnails aren't stored on the disk. That's something I would have done but actually his implementation makes sense. I should just get memcached up and running to make it super awesome since it doesn't store them on disk.
And since it does generate thumbnails on the fly, I used django-pagination to paginate the images and all in all I'm pleased! Unless you *must* have thumbnails stored on disk I believe sorl-thumbnail is the best option around so check it out.
One thing to note is that it doesn't seem to ever delete the physical file when deleting the ImageField object. From what I can tell this is a Django issue in that he's just calling built in DJango method and Django is now so safe that it doesn't delete physical files. That is probably a good thing but I did decide to hook some code into the post_delete signal to remove the file. In my mind it should delete them. You should be backing things up if you want a copy still after clicking the delete button rather than relying on your system leaving clutter.
It's web scale!
I'm sure a lot of people have heard complaints about MongoDB and node.js and for the most part I'd agree with them. There isn't much use for these technologies for the majority of people, they're still growing and have issues.
That said I did some programming with node.js with mongoDB and it was surprisingly easy. I'd even argue the two are a perfect match. They don't solve anything I need to do that I can't do with another language and traditional RDBMS but you can write up something relatively quickly that will be generally be fast and feels like a good mix.
I'm definitely going to give these two technologies further consideration and put them on the pile of things to learn with Ruby and Scala. It would be nice if days were longer than 24 hours.
Fixes and releasing the source code
I've added in a few more fixes to this site's code and added a new feature (displaying my twitter home timeline). There are probably only a couple more things I want to fix / replace. The biggest being writing my own page parser to do pygments conversion rather than going back and excluding things I've missed before in someone's library meant to offer a full and very useful bbcode suite.
Unfortunately some much more important job related stuff has come up so it may be a month or two before I do so. Unless of course I end up with more free time on my hands than I expected. While I will almost certainly host the code on bitbucket or github, I will likely set up my own repository here as well.
I am going to start looking through my backup drive too and look for projects to share. Providing there are too many embarrassing mistakes to try and clean up!
Visual Studio Achievements
It turns out Visual Studio now has achievements. Microsoft's Channel 9 team announced this today and yeah ok it is just an extension but it just strikes me as an uncool company trying too hard to be cool.
Everyone knows the cool people code with vim or emacs on Linux. Coding in Visual Studio is about as cool as writing EJBs for in your tiny cubicle.
Django pagination solution
I, like many other people, have written all sorts of custom pagination solutions for Django. If you can't be bothered have a look at the package django-pagination.
In a minute you can have an excellent standard pagination solution that should cover 99% of developer's needs. If you would like to contribute to the project you can also find it on GitHub.