django

Ok, world, big fat disclaimer here: I'm not an experienced developer in all of the web frameworks that have existed in the history of ever (I've only done kinda serious stuff in three of 'em) and this thing I'm saying here is more of a hypothesis that I'm currently putting to experience's scrutiny than a rational, exhaustively thought, conclusion. Now, read on.

Nowadays, there are lots of web frameworks, and people have done wonderful stuff with them (twitter was written initially with ruby on rails, p.e.). And, truly, they have allowed the now commonplace fast, yet robust and standards compliant, development of big projects. But what about the little projects? Those little apps with at most a couple of tables in a database and a simple service to offer? Well, the really cool and experienced developers just do that in the big frameworks too...

Ay, there's the rub that makes big frameworks of so big a hype.

My main projects are in Django, and I've become accustomed to developing in english. But my main audience speaks spanish. So crazy stuff happens when other people test my apps and we see, astonished and enraged, a UnicodeDecodeError. In fact, I took a picture of myself when such an error occurred:

Last week, I added markdown support to a little blog engine I wrote for a django tutorial. And well, I accomplished it in minutes! I like markdown because is really easy to write and generates amazing html. It is presented here and the syntax is explained neatly in Stack Overflow, and they use it, too.

My approach was really simple: I wanted to write the posts in markdown with a preview (like in the question edition in Stack Overflow), store the posts in markdown and display them in html.