I'm not very artistic, but I managed to throw together a servicable icon for my website using Vectr, a SVG drawing tool. Hopefully you guys can figure out what it is suppose to be. :)
Woof Woof
Afterwards, I used this online favicon generator to create all the icon collateral for Android, iOS, and regular web browsers. It pretty useful, as not only does it generate the proper image sizes, but it also autogenerates the html tags and provides a quick and easy validation service as well.
As an sidenote, I originally set up the favicon path in the Nginx conf file. This seems to work for IE, Edge, and Firefox, but Chrome doesn't recognize it. As such, I recommend just setting the favicon path information in the HTML header blocks.
Setting up the Contact Form...
The Bootstrap Blog template I started with had Javascript and PHP starter code for the contact page. However, since I'm already up and running with Django, and I am pretty knowledgable with Python, it really doesn't make sense for me to set up and support PHP, a language I've never used before.
Retrofitting the code for Django wasn't too difficult. I created a new /contact_msg/ page which the existing contact form directs its POST output to. This contact_msg page is managed by a Django view, which in the presence of a AJAX POST request, will send an email with the form's information to contact@rickyan.com.
I'm actually having a free Gmail account handle the contact functionality for me. In my settings.py file, you can see the SMTP settings to direct to the Google mail servers. My account information is not included in the Git repo (for obvious reasons), but you can see examples of the setup here.
Two things to note. First. the Gmail account you are using to handle contact messages needs its security settings to be modified. You will have to allow less secures apps to access the account, and you won't be able to turn on two-step authentications. I recommend creating a new email account just for this purpose if you choose to go this route.
Finally, if you want to protect against Cross-Site Request Forgeries, you will have to add some more code to set it up. Since this is just a contact form, CSRF attacks are not applicable, and I chose not to add protection on the POST command.
Next Steps...
Now that my website's basic functionality is pretty much all up and running, my next focus is to codify my posts. Right now, I'm still creating a static page per post - I'm planning on creating a generic post template and populating it with post context stored in a backend DB. This might be convoluted given my limited exposure to web programming, so I'll do some research to see if there are better options.