Why I didn't blog much about Korea

• It was kinda dull. Much of my experience was a less interesting, more disorganized version of last year.
• I've been distracted. On a whim, I started learning Django (and by extension, the Python programming language), and the deeper I get into it, the more I'm enjoying it.

Before I left Dalian a month ago, I'd planned on spending my time (and hence, not my limited budget) plowing into Drupal and PHP, since that's what we used for DalianDalian. It also seemed a logical follow to my efforts with XHTML and CSS.

What diverted me was Matt Waite's blog post on learning Django. I followed the links, started playing, and ended up somewhere very different from where I intended to be. Such is life, I suppose.

Anyway, I've yet to build anything useful with Django, but I think I'm close. I'm six chapters into the Django Book, which I highly recommend (along with How to Think Like a Computer Scientist for fellow Python newbies).

Ultimately, I'm hoping this helps me do more of the kind of journalism I did at my old newspaper, covering education. I used to rummage through state databases on schools and demographics and test scores and teacher pay, turning it all into blobs of text. Mind you, I think they were very well formed blobs of text, but that's not always the best thing to do with this kind of information.

Text is good for context and analysis, for presenting trends, for guiding a reader through a pile of numbers. But it's worth letting people sift data on their own and presenting it in a way that makes doing so easy. Hopefully, Django will help me do that.

Before: Podcast: At Home in Dalian, China | After: So long Dalian, and thanks for all the fish