My first (useful) website using Django.

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I have been dabbling with Django for a while now and have made several sites. Most the time they never make it online or even get finished. With some time on my hand I decided to make a project that was useful to me: Code Atlas.

I often found myself looking through bookmarks, old projects and text files looking for code snippets and notes solving a specific problem. Sometimes spending just as much time looking as the trying to solve the problem! If only I had sorted these notes in some format. That's where I got the idea for Code Atlas. A centralised place for keeping notes. On Code Atlas, you can create a "Notes" which are used to store anything that might be useful to know in the future. This could be a link to an article or a code snippet. These notes can be tagged and include markdown. The value comes from how easy it is to search for these notes. Never again will I have to pour over my bookmarks bar or search through heaps of forum posts. When searching, results are pulled from the Django documentation and shown along side your relevant notes.

I have deployed the site using zappa and loved how easy the process has been. I am using an EC2 instance for the database and the AWS free tier means that this setup is costing me nothing.

You can visit the site at: [https://code-atlas.me](https://code-atlas.me) as well as the project repo [here](https://github.com/Maxamuss/code-atlas).

Any feedback or comments would be greatly appreciated. I hope someone else other than me might find this useful. Cheers

21 thoughts on “My first (useful) website using Django.”

  3. > I have deployed the site using zappa and loved how easy the process has been. I am using an EC2 instance for the database and the AWS free tier means that this setup is costing me nothing.

    Nice, I’ve done this exact thing a few times.

    Bear in mind if your application needs to have access to the internet (e.g. make a http request to some 3rd party API) you might need to pay for a NAT Gateway.

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  5. Site is looking pretty neat man. Sorry if I am being noob but you have mentioned AWS free tier, does that mean hosting free on AWS? If yes can you please instruct on how?

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  8. Great job. Some notes on how to make this really shine as a portfolio piece:

    * use [Poetry](https://python-poetry.org/) for your requirements (all the cool kids are doing it)
    * expand your readme.md to explain how to build/test/deploy
    * although you don’t need it, provide a dockerfile and an easy way to run it locally
    * add [badges](https://help.github.com/en/actions/configuring-and-managing-workflows/configuring-a-workflow#adding-a-workflow-status-badge-to-your-repository)
    * tag your releases adhering to [semver](https://semver.org/)

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  11. In addition to notes from others, please proofread all the text on your site. I see some punctuation mistakes and some text needs rephrasing.

    Great design btw. Very elegant code.

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  15. Nice man, looks great!. Honestly I’ve been looking to deploy my app but I always find trouble with heroku. So can you post a zappa deploy tutorial that you find helpful? I’m looking on my own but still

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  16. I was thinking of creating something similar for my own needs but now I don’t need to never reinvent the wheel if there is already a solution better than my own and this Is I will start using this in a couple weeks as I have some designing of an app to do first andl linux os to setup.

    There is another app simialry to yours although not as nice on design is 3cols

    Also great design

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  18. Nice, the highlight box on the menu button can look a bit off when clicking, currently on mobile. I had this problem on my site, with css animation and made a div in front of the menu button, the same size, and then called a function to activate the menu on click. So you only actually click the box in front, not the menu button.

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