by Daniel Davies

A while ago I wrote a series on Setting up a Django Webserver. It was quite an ambitious guide and spanned four fairly long posts. They're also quite a popular source of Google juice, so I hope people are finding the articles useful! The problem was that they were just regular blog posts. I'm quite "anti" going back and modifying posts to link up related articles because that can cause confusion in RSS. I thus needed a way to cleanly link up related articles, without changing my URL structure and breaking what already exists.

Roll on my new series feature! On the train back from Stafford to Birmingham something was going on in Wolverhampton. A 30 minute train journey was delayed to 1 hour and 15 minutes, the perfect amount of time to quickly implement a new feature to the blog. Here's how it works:

  • You can browse all series available on the site using the "series" link at the top of the page,
  • When an article is part of a series the sidebar changes, informing the user the article is part of a series,
  • At the bottom of every article in a series are two handy links; one to the previous article in the series, one to the next article,
  • Each series produces an RSS feed.

Hopefully that'll make the site a little easier to use, and encourage me to write up more guides and series. Its just one new model, feel free to check it out in my SVN repository.

Talk about Series Link

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re: Series Link

Posted by Michael

This sounds cool. One day, when I'm feeling brave, I might try using it! Got to get my head around Python a bit more first though.

But on a pedantic side-issue, I don't understand why you're so against linking up old articles. Even if it does confuse RSS (and I can't see why it should, unless the link is changed), surely the visitor's experiences of the website is more important? Linking up articles helps readers find their way around, and means more of your content is likely to be read.

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re: Series Link

Posted by Daniel Davies

Hi Michael, thanks for the comment. This blog's code hopefully stands as a good reference point to anyone wanting to get started with Django so feel free to take a look around it if you ever give Python a go.

With regards to linking articles. To go back through each article in a series and edit a post to link to the next or previous ones feels a little messy. I fully agree articles should be linked, but I wanted a more elegant solution that gave no headache when manually adding the links. http://www.danux.co.uk/article/setting-django-web-server-part-2/ for example has links at the bottom of the article to previous and next, but they are automagically generated by the site so I don't need to worry about maintaining links.

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