Introduction to my First Course on Backpack.

Hi everyone, so I wanted to share a little bit about my first course on Backpack, which is the personal learning site that I'm building.

The name of the course is "Dynamic Site Generation with Markdown & Django". I actually wanted to call it "not another Django course," but the reason I didn't is because I actually think it's different from everything else you'll find out there.

This is a hands-on walk-through of how to create your own dynamic blog using Mark Down and Django together in a way that I haven't seen before.

So what does Markdown? Well, it's a human readable text format that I use to write all my content in because it's so simple to write and it helps me get the styling out of the way. If you have ever been writing in Word and realized that you've spent the last 30 minutes applying bold to all of The headings in your text, you might be like me in that when you have a tool that gives you all of these styling options, you waste a lot of time styling. So Markdown is a way of writing, not just a file format that allows you to focus on the important things, the content.

I will take you from the very first beginnings of a Django project all the way to a finished result.

This course is from the perspective of someone who just recently learned Django, so it's not going to gloss over the details. I will get into the weeds with you and help you explain some of the idiosyncrasies of Django.

In terms of prerequisites, I am happy to hold your hand and get you going on many of the technical aspects. I use Linux to deploy my website and I know many of you won't be familiar with that.

However, at the same time, some Comfortability with programming languages would be really helpful for this course, so if you've Play it around with Python before that would be very useful for you. And it's not that you can't do it without Python. It's that you'll recognize a lot of the patterns that you see in Python because Django is a web hosting framework that's built on top of Python.

But Dan, you say, I'm your robotics researcher. Why are you creating a course on Django? Over the years, I've moved a lot of the content that I write to Markdown. And yet, a lot of the static site generators that I use to create web pages from that content seem to be lacking. They were hard to learn, they weren't very extensible, and that wasn't their job. So, as I became an expert in Markdown, I realized that I was being limited by the tools that I was using, and I wanted to create my own. So, this course stems from the fact that I had a real use case, and I built something. And now I've made something that I think is so valuable that I think you could use it to.

But because I'm a robotics researcher and not a web developer, there are some advantages to the way I'm teaching it. This course is developed from the perspective of someone who recently learned it. So it's not going to necessarily explain everything the canonical way a Django developer would. This is going to be a solution that works for you, And there is room to grow both for me, this course, and after you get this far.

But the benefit is that I can still remember my process of learning, and relate some of my confusion to you in a way that hopefully makes it easier for you to pick it up. I'll take you along with me on my learning journey.

So what are you going to learn in this course? I think that this course takes you much further than most of the websites that I found when I was looking to pick it up, which Generally help you create a project and deploy your first page.This course takes you a lot further than that and with a very specific focus on integrating the functionality of Markdown with the feature set and ease of use of Django.

First, we'll discuss what is Django and how do you install it? We'll also talk a little bit about Markdown and why I've picked it as the horse to ride in terms ofDocumenting your work. Our first project will be to integrate Markdown and Django together, and to create a single page site that renders Markdown into a very basic HTML site.

But that's not all. The next steps involve beautifying your site and making it more functional. So they goes from a single HTML page rendered from a Markdown source to a fully functional blogging site that allows you to navigate, extend and use the functionality of Django that's built in.

Some of the examples of this include navigation. I'm fairly opinionated on the fact that I've already created my documentation once. I don't want to have the website impose its own navigation on the structure that I already created once. So we'll talk a little bit about how to create a navigation tool that allows you to replicate the structure of your Markdown Folder structure so that you can navigate on the web the same way that you would navigate in your file folders.

We'll also talk about beautifying your site, how to add CSS and styling to your pages to make it a little bit more beautiful, usable, and navigable.

Then we'll start to add in functionality that you would be familiar with on any blog, personal blog or website or static site generator. We'll talk about navigation by date. We'll talk about adding search. We'll talk about the administration side of things, the management side of things, which is something only Django provides compared to other static site generators.

So if you want to know who's this course for, I would say it's for somebody who wants a simple entry point into creating a Markdown enabled website.

So please go on over to https://backpack.danaukes.com and create an account and pre-register for the course. I think if you are like me and have found value and marked down but need a little bit more functionality, this is the perfect course for you to start with.