Ross Poulton

In October last year I put together a summary of payment processing options for Australian startups, as it was at that point in time.

Back in 2008 I started djangosites.org as a listing of websites powered by Django.

Not that long ago, startups and hobby businesses had very few options for accepting online payments here in Australia.

Three weeks ago, on September 4th, my father Phillip Harry Poulton passed away at age 58 after a brief battle with cancer of the gall bladder.

Like many startups, I use CPC ads to attract attention to WhisperGifts.

I've been a long-time FastMail user, and they make me happy.

Lincoln Loop are one of the earlier Django-based development shops, and their various employees contribute in many ways to the open-source community.

I carry two mobile phones, for most of the week.

I'm not one to jump from productivity tool to tool to try and become 5% better.

Occasionally I need to take WhisperGifts offline, but still show some parts of the site to users.

A little while ago I rebuilt my homepage.

Payments in Australia are controlled by the so-called "big four" banks, and it's been difficult for a long time for startups to get merchant facilities to process credit cards online.

Last month, this website passed it's ten-year anniversary.

Yesterday I posted that Django was almost certainly suitable to use for your project.

Short: Yes.

The WhisperGifts re-launch recently went very well!

Way back in 2007, my wife Lauren and I got married and went looking for a good bridal gift registry service.

A fun anecdote, showing why you should investigate issues that occur too regularly to be co-incidence.

I'm cleaning out my servers and have a few domains I want to sell or give away, including opocket.com (and .net, .org); twolines.com.au and thesecretsanta.com.au.

For the past few years I've hosted all of my projects on a single RimuHosting VPS.

Heads-up: DjangoSites.org will be down, at some point in the next week, while I move it to a new server.

Last week, the team over at 37Signals wrote up an article on their newly implemented Key-based cache expiration system and it hit me: It's such a simple idea with obvious benefits, why hadn't I implemented a similar caching mechanism before?

My day job is as a CRM consultant for Professional Advantage.

I'm not one to blog about personal topics, but I have to make an exception as 2011 has been a heck of a year on a number of fronts.

Many moons ago on this blog I wrote about a simple menuing system for Django.

A while ago I released a helpdesk tool that I use to manage support requests, under the name of Jutda Helpdesk (named after my small consulting company).

Every person that submits a site to DjangoSites gets a chance to include details about how they deployed their website: what database they use, what version of Django they use, and so on.

Recently I've been on a quest to simplify the way I deliver my websites to my customers.

You can now update your DjangoSites website screenshot by simply editing your listing and ticking the box that says "Re-do Screenshot".

For various reasons I haven't been able to post a Django Site of the Week for quite a while now, which is a little embarrassing.

According to the official Django Documentation, there are around a half-dozen documented and supported ways of deploying Django in production environments.

Seeing how other people work is something that seems to be of interest to most developers.

Recently, I have wanted to improve the searching ability in a number of my projects.

Eric Floehr is the man behind ForecastWatch and ForecastAdvisor, two Django-powered weather websites that aggregate and analyse weather forecasts to compare their accuracy on an ongoing basis.

ShutterCal is a photo sharing site with a difference - it encourages contributors to upload one photo every day to help people reach a goal: whether that may be to improve their photography, watch themselves evolve over a year, or remember people and plac…

To better fit with both my own way of doing things and with general web browsing patterns of the Django SOTW public, I'm moving the SOTW to Mondays rather than Saturdays.

Represent is a new website prototype from the New York Times that provides New York residents with information about the whereabouts of their elected representatives.

The Django Site of the Week is back after a Christmas-induced break with an interview with Adrian Holovaty.

For the second Django SOTW, I had a chat to Bruce Kroeze about one of his Satchmo projects, Ooh-Ga-Boo-Gah.

For an ongoing project I am implementing basic advertising functionality, where I define a number of positions in the page and advertisers can self-serve to create an advertisement to fit those positions.

Since I started DjangoSites over a year ago, the response has been fantastic.

I've had a few meetings recently relating to Django, so I figured I should have some of my own business cards.

Over at DjangoSites there is a steady flow of new websites, with a handful showing up every single day.

I'm a firm believer in providing a great customer support experience to your customers, so when I needed a way to manage customer requests for WhisperGifts, I began putting together an in-house solution.

My projects were all running on an SVN checkout from late April 2007, after the Queryset-refactor branch was merged into trunk.

It's kind of nerdy and geeky, but we've just passed the 1337th approved site on DjangoSites.

I launched DjangoSites publicly last June, and since then we've had over 1,250 websites submitted to what has become the ultimate directory of Django-powered websites.

OpenID is, in my opinion, critical in the success of an open web.

My previous blog was my first ever Django application.

I got married in March 2007, within a few months of a number of friends.