I applied some finishing touches this morning and have since completed UVaHousing.com. Have a look and find a place to live. Version 2 is on the way soon; leave a comment if there are some missing features you’d like to see!
The site is quite cool under the hood. Anybody can build a real-estate website with a week of time and their favorite web framework. This project is a bit more than that to me; I started wanting to build a django site that really abides by the django design philosophy: no quick hacks, doing everything the proper way while maintaining significant attention to detail. To most python hackers, this is old news, but it’s pretty cool to me at least.
I can’t really emphasize enough how important it is to learn the style and philosophy behind any tool you use. It’s always so exciting to start playing with a new program/framework as soon as you download it, but don’t under-estimate the utility of taking your time and learning how to do things the right way. I’ve been using django for about a year now, but have only begun to realize how useful it actually is.