Being that I am creating a site tightly coupled with events and calendars, I need some event functionality.  There are three options:

1. The event subsystem from Django Basic Apps
2. Somebody’s self-maintained event app
3. And … the event system that’s in Pinax

Option 3 really is great.  What a great app written with some really good methods including Periods and Relations.  I’m very excited to use it.

I’m not sure if anybody noticed, but the site was taken down for a few days because somebody defaced it.  I kind of liked the music that they put on my homepage, but after listening to the song, I had to go about fixing it.  What did I learn?

1. Don’t use shared hosts.  In this day and age, unless you are super poor, do not use a shared host.  If you are not technically savvy, use services for specific tasks (i.e. blogger.com for a blog) so you don’t have to think about the technology/maintenance.  If you are technically savvy and you have needs that are not basic, get a server where you have root access.  AWS ec2 is awesome for this.  The cost is $75 a month though so it may be too expensive for some people (although if you can set one up - I can probably find a gig for you to make enough money to pay that $75/month - just drop me a line).
2. Dreamhost.com, while pretty good and having good customer service, just isn’t what I need.  People have recommended gandi.net for name services and hosting if you need the cheap option for hosting.  I haven’t used it personally but knowledgeable people love them.

Oh, I don’t think I’ve done an update on platform choices either.  Here is where I stand now:

1. MySQL 5.0.45 (I’m still contemplating PostgreSQL)
2. Python 2.5.1
3. Apache 2.2.9
4. Fedora 8 (I like the Fedora/Red Hat series - Debian/Ubuntu was giving me grief).
5. Django 1.0
6. Pinax trunk

That was fun!  I feel very excited about the Python community.  It’s a smaller group but it’s growing fast and it has solid support out there.  In addition, it’s a rock solid language with full unicode support - I love that.