Weeds, while hated, flourish

Deciding to prefer Gremlin over the basic Neo4j REST API in neo4django was quite a plunge. It’s an ongoing process, but I’ve realized that clever use of Gremlin and Cypher are the future for performant remote access to the database, and the switch has already shown significant gains.

One of the first issues I had was the constant need to send large, repetitive scripts over the wire. I wanted a server-side library, but I couldn’t require all users of neo4django to install a custom database extension just to try out the library. Right now, users simply pip install neo4django, fire up the database, and they’re ready to go. That simplicity is important, and worth preserving. And with the recent Heroku addon, I know I’m not the only one with this problem.

Yesterday, we released another major neo4django milestone. You can get it from PyPi or GitHub.

Because the library is not feature complete- in particular, the lack of relationship models is a problem for many Neo4j users- the milestone is merely a minor revision number. This milestone is important for a few reasons, however.

The decision to release a piece of software into the wild can be difficult. Do you wait until you've fully expressed your vision, or push it out early in the hopes of greater community participation? If you push it out, will it be taken seriously? What if the kids on the Internet don't like me?

Scholrly is working on a Neo4j/Django integration layer based on neo4j.py 's Django support. The layer emulates Django's ORM at the model level, so it has to do all sorts of metaprogramming backflips.

My personal favorite result of those acrobatics up last week.

Recent experiences with Tumblr have led me to believe that the primary purpose of a blogging platform should be to encourage users to blog. World-shaking, right? A product should encourage users to come back.

To that end, I've given up on using Drupal for my personal blog. Personal blogging is not where Drupal shines, and it's a bitch to switch to PHP mode anytime I need something customized.

I resolved to migrate to Tumblr, only to find out that I couldn't preserve old URLs. Ouch. And, honestly, I knew that there'd be some little thing like that that I'd use as an excuse to keep running my own blog. If it wasn't custom URLs, it'd be SSL, or the inability to add titles to picture posts (err!).

So I wrote another Django blog. And so far, I'm pretty happy. There are posts and tags, and some basic stuff I need like scheduling posts. Most importantly, though, I want to blog again.