Sporadic notes, Q3 2023

I’ve been tinkering recently with this site, including updates to the RSS feed. The biggest change though is how I’m handling the draft-to-publish post: I’m now using two databases.

As it was set up before, there was a is_published option on the post model. Once that was checked and saved, the post would be public in feeds and on the archive page. So far so good. But if I wanted or needed to make edits, any changes would be immediately visible—I didn’t have an option to preview changes before publishing them.

Now, with two databases, drafts are saved to the drafts database and the RSS feed and archive pages read from the default, or public, database. Fortunately, Django makes this relatively easy to set up.

When I’m ready to make a draft public, I use the publish function to save the draft to the public database. Then I can go back and make edits on the draft and publish them whenever I’m ready.

I recently joined a local makerspace, and have signed up to get authorized on their Glowforge. I’m looking forward to making more “busy box” type things with custom enclosures.