Saturday, November 12, 2005

Last time I visited New Orleans on July 23, 2005 on my way to Florida. It was a short visit. I planned to stop again on my way back, but I didn't have time. "New Orleans is not going anywhere. I can do it some other time." One month later Hurricane Katrina made landfall devastating New Orleans.

I am looking at pictures I took during that brief stay — everything is so peaceful. It was about noon. Streets were practically empty. Tourists were sleeping late after crazy night on Rue Bourbon.

This is one of my favorite pictures of the set. The horse is waiting while guide talks about history of New Orleans to tourists. You can see more on Flickr.

It feels strange to look at these pictures now — some places were destroyed by flood, or trashed by looters. It felt surreal when I read news about Katrina. I still hope to come back one day and see the city in its full glory. I hope New Orleans will bounce back.

As you all know Django has new shiny RSS framework. This change breaks my simple RSS tutorial and I am glad that it happened! To tell you the whole truth, it breaks only "The Simple Way" to do RSS in Django replacing it with even simpler one. "The Smart Way" RSS still works as you can see on my web site. Like I predicted the feedgenerator is still around and it learned some new tricks: it can produce Atom feed now! I am going to update the tutorial recreating old examples with new RSS framework. It will be fun!

Now with RSS overhaul behind us I will add Atom feed to my web site. Additionally I plan to increase repertoire of feeds by adding simple implementation of Google Sitemap protocol.