In the next few weeks I will be deploying a new DNS server, standalone, with a custom control panel.

It is using PowerDNS.  The panel is written in PHP and located on the webserver, not the new DNS box.  The only non-DNS service I am running is MySQL, this is where PowerDNS gets its zones from.

I have have started work on coding the panel to also support slave DNS servers, however not using “notify” built into DNS servers, rather using the panel to create Master & Alias servers.  This just replicates the data across more than one server.  Much simpler to setup and all of the software exists in standard debian repositories (I think, if not I will also be adding details on adding new ones to the list)

Please do be aware though, I will not necessarily be releasing all of the source code for this, however there will be tutorials on writing it yourself, as well as a few scripts & commands to run to get your current BIND based zone files into the MySQL database of your new setup.

Well, at the moment I am working on a site, built with Django.  I’ve decided to, sort of, release the source code for it.  What I will be doing is writing tutorials based on many aspects of the site, which also means…real world examples rather than just snippets and hello world.

All of the Django based tutorials will be published in full on DjangoRocks.com and a few will probably make it here as well.  It may help a few people, who knows.  Some of the key parts of it include;

• Breadcrumbs
• User profiles
• Writing a forum
• Generic foreign keys
• Custom template tags
• Image upload & manipulation
• Internationalization (possibly)
• Scheduled tasks
• HTML & Text E-mail with templates
• Caching & Performance

Thats just the Django parts, also expect a couple of javascript (mainly MooTools) tutorials as well. The Javascript tutorials will, initially, only be posted on this site. There isn’t really much point in posting MooTools tutorials, on a Django site.

• Simple lightbox
• Slideshow
• Some AJAX tabs

I know scripts for those are all available, but scripts you use don’t really make you better developers.  People don’t usually spend time finding out what the scripts do, but hopefully they will be a guide into the mootools world.