my first python website

api.bicingwatch.com has now been up for two weeks. It is a small site with just a handful of html views and some JSON views.

I also use python now to scrape the bicing.com website and store the results in a mysql database. This does not include the data I had already collected over the last year, which I will import soon.

Today I also enabled disqus commenting on the station pages. I originally planned to write this myself, but this is way quicker and I can always change to the django commenting system later.

Overall I am very happy with python and pretty used to the syntax now. I really like the internal dicts and arrays, much better than the php version and on the same level as Perl. I also like the way errors are handled, which is always with exceptions. In Perl and PHP these are very much optional and are not used a lot.

What I don't like is the quality of some of the libraries, they clearly have to do some catching up to do with CPAN.