Eric Florenzano's Blog

I am me.

Fun Way of Displaying a Blogroll

I’ve just relaunched the redesign of this site. Nothing major is different, but one fun thing that I’d like to highlight is the way the blogroll is displayed. I got the idea from Motel de Moka, which has more links to work with than I do.

First, I set up a very simple model:

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class BlogRollLink(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    date_added = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
    url = models.URLField()

But we’ve got a problem at this point: we can’t order this by the number of characters in the name. So we must modify our model to have an integer called name_size, and then override BlogRollLink’s save function to fill in that field any time the model is saved. Our final model is below:

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class BlogRollLink(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    name_size = models.IntegerField(editable=False)
    date_added = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
    url = models.URLField()

    def save(self):
        self.name_size = len(self.name)
        super(BlogRollLink, self).save()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return self.url

    class Admin:
        pass

Now to display this on every page, I’ve created a context processor named blogroll_processor. It looks like this:

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def blogroll_processor(request):
    blogrolls = cache.get('blogrolls', None)
    if blogrolls == None:
        blogrolls = list(BlogRollLink.objects.all().order_by('name_size'))
        cache.set('blogrolls', blogrolls)
    return {'blogrolls' : blogrolls}

And we’re done! A nifty "waterfall" of blogs. Let me know what you think about this technique. Is it stupid?