Geographical django website demo¶

Tags: django, nelenschuurmans

One of the reasons I gave for giving me a mac was I’ll be able to make proper screencasts. I’ve got a mac now, so I have to make screencasts :-) The style I thought out for myself is to make two different versions of each video:

• One on my personal title on my own blog on my own smugmug account. I get to decide what to say and what to show, naturally. I’ll do it in English and I’ll show the technical aspects.
• One for Nelen & Schuurmans. A bit more polished and a bit less personal. In Dutch :-) And focused more on our customers’ language.

Not all videos that I make will get that second version, probably. Anyway, I’ve got a new toy to play with (again) and I’ve made my first screencast in two years!

What do I want to show in this screencast?

• Hey, we make pretty OK geographical websites with lots of water data behind it.
• Hey, it is all working pretty OK. Not always terribly fast, but that’s because we didn’t get to the proper caching part yet. There’s no TileCache or whatever to speed it all up. Just a bit of basic django “local memory” testing... Lots of fun to be had in this area: speeding it all up!
• We use a whopping amount of open source libraries. Python, django, mapnik, matplotlib, blueprint css, jquery, openlayers, gdal, openstreetmap and a couple more.
• You can make pretty sweet websites once you’ve got a basic framework (lizard-ui and lizard-map in our case) in place. This very website cost me about a week full-time.

Anyway, here’s the screencast (here’s a full screen version, btw):