I’m very happy to announce you that the new version of Rancho is out!

This version has many new things starting by its name/number. We decided to start using n Ubuntu-like versioning and so, instead of just incrementing numbers, we’ll use the year.month notation. So here you have the 9.06!

But what’s new in this new version!?

One of the main new features is the exportation and importation of you accounts using the Rancho Exportation File.
This file will contain all the information that you have on your Rancho system so you can use it for example on other systems or as a back up, etc.

Another really useful new feature is that now Rancho can import Basecamp exportation files! This means that you can export your account from Basecamp, import it on your Rancho installation and keep using what you had.

The design changed just a bit regarding the layout which is now fluid, adapting itself to your browser’s width.

For the admins, we introduced a logging system that let you easily see what’s being done in the whole system.
The search was also improved in terms of power and presentation. Search results are now divided in categories (Messages, Milestones, Wikiboars, etc.) to be easily filtered according to what users need.

To end, people in every project can now chat with each other with the new integrated real-time chat and a lot of bugs were fixed.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

What are you waiting for? Get now Rancho 9.06 from www.getrancho.com!

Howdy Rancho fans!

Like some (many?) of you noticed, we had been having problems in Rancho server since quite a long time.
The machine that was serving Rancho had some kind of trouble and was switching of all the time.

Finally this week my friend (and Rancho’s co-lead developer) Luís Rodrigues changed Rancho host and we’re set!

Hopefully, Rancho will be available 24/7 from now on.
Also, note that we changed some of the subdomains, so, you should check Rancho’s web site for the new URLs, mainly SVN’s and Trac’s.

Please let us know of eventual problems with the new page in our Google Group.

Big thanks to Luís Rodrigues for having fixed this problem!

I was invited to give a class in the Master en Software Libre covering an introduction to Django.

So, tomorrow I’m heading south to Vigo and present our favorite web framework (”THE” web framework, for many of us) .

I’ll start by giving an overview of Django, what it’s all about and why people should use it. Then I’ll do a tiny project with the audience so they get a real feel of it.

Although this degree covers several stuff, it is indeed a good thing that they chose to have an introduction to Django as well.
It can only mean Django is getting more and more important like it deserves to be.

Hope the audience enjoys, I’ll try not to be boring!

(I’ll upload the slide afterwards)

So, it’s the middle of the week and I’m posting about last weekend (yeah, it’s sad…).

Last weekend I could do some work on Rancho and I committed a patch to make its width fluid, that is, to be relative to your screen resolution instead of having a fixed size. (let me know if it’s working right in your machine)
The rest of the day was dedicated to watching some movies with my girlfriend

On Sunday I had the pleasure to show the beautiful city of A Coruña to my parents who came to visit me.
We had a great lunch at La Penela, a restaurant in the main city’s square.
They really liked the city and the people and specially enjoyed the landscape where the sea meets land and the mix of buildings with traditional tapas cafes and small grocery stores.

You should also take a break and visit this kind city where, as the people here say, “No one is an outsider”.

Will Larson wrote this great article on how to use Django to create those web pages you happily used to do when all you knew was HTML.

Until about an year ago, I was using PHP for these static web pages.
The idea was to have just one base index.php and include files by usage of GET to retrieve the PHP files. It was a basic but helpful automation.

The way Will teach you with Django and a basic Python script is much more useful as it abstracts a bunch of stuff.

Give it a try!