Entries in category “Meta”
Micro.
Published April 29, 2008
As a general rule, the things I write fall into two categories: long-form (for the medium of blogging, that is; the book is “long” in a very different sense), in-depth pieces which tend to be either tutorials on various aspects of working with Django or op-ed bits on web development and the Web in general, and short-form tidbits which mostly consist of a thought or two. Typically I never post the latter, because it always ...
Minty fresh
Published April 19, 2008
For a while now I’ve been really disappointed with the state of web stats.
When I moved over to my shiny new server back in September of last year, I ditched Mint because it requires PHP and MySQL, neither of which will ever, under any circumstances, be allowed on my box. So I started fishing around for something else; most other host-it-yourself stats packages were, frankly, crap either in terms of what they tracked ...
More slides
Published March 16, 2008
I gave a quick talk at the Django open session last night, and I’ll be giving it again here in a few minutes as a proper lightning talk, briefly walking through the process of some of the database-backed journalism projects we do at the Journal-World (specifically this feature on crime reports at the local university campus).
Slides are already online. If you’re at PyCon and want to hear the talk, come to the ...
Slides
Published March 15, 2008
I just finished my talk, which apparently included a bonus live transcript on IRC by Justin Lilly, and I think it went pretty well considering how much ground it had to cover and how nervous I was up until the moment when I started talking.
If you aren’t at PyCon, or if you are but didn’t come to the talk, or if you just want to download them and mash them up, my ...
Where to find me at PyCon
Published March 12, 2008
My flight arrived in Chicago a while ago, and despite an attempt by the hotel to screw it up, I’m currently sitting in my room enjoying a beer before bed. Here’s my plan for the next few days:
- Thursday: Working on slides and stuff morning/afternoon, doing the code lab tutorial in the evening.
- Friday: Definitely hitting up both Django-related talks.
- Saturday: Hear me speak!
- Sunday: Probably going to the “What Zope did ...
Advertising and me
Published March 11, 2008
Recently I received an email from a company that’s in the online advertising business; they run a network that places targeted ads on a collection of sites, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in running them here. I just finished writing a reply and, since I’ve gotten a couple such offers in the recent past, I figured it’s probably time to make a public statement of my policy toward ...
Miscellany
Published February 10, 2008
Between normal work, working on the book, working on my upcoming PyCon talk and working on a couple little things on the side, I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, especially about Django. But I’ve built up a collection of little things that need to get posted, so I’m just going to start dumping them out here and then get back to not having any free time :)
A django-registration update
I ...
Media moves
Published February 7, 2008
As of sometime this weekend when the DNS change propagated, all static/media files for this site migrated over to Amazon’s S3 storage service; when I relaunched back in September, media was coming off a Joyent BingoDisk account. While a change in media serving technology really isn’t all that sexy or exciting compared to some aspects of web development (or as popular as writing about whatever Microsoft is doing today), I’d like ...
The why and wherefore
Published December 31, 2007
So, let me straighten a few things out.
First off, this is my personal blog. What you see here is me speaking my own personal mind, and I neither represent nor want to represent anything larger: not Django, not Python web development, not my employer, not anything except me and whatever I feel like writing about. This is an important point to keep in mind, because I don’t have any claim to represent anything ...
Speaking and writing
Published December 12, 2007
First off, if you’re going to PyCon (Chicago, March 14-16), make some room on your schedule; there are several interesting talks on Django scheduled, including one by yours truly.
The description of my talk on the PyCon site is somewhat pithy on account of space restrictions, but conveys the general idea of what I’ll be talking about; flexible, reusable Django applications are one of my pet topics, and I’ll be covering some ...
A couple updates
Published December 9, 2007
Today marks two releases, both numbered 0.4, of django-registration and template_utils.
The new release of django-registration is largely a matter of policy; there’s no new functionality or features, but there is one backwards-incompatible change: the validation of passwords (verifying that the same password is entered in both fields) has been moved to the clean() method of RegistrationForm, which means that the error message from a password mismatch is now accessed via form.non_field_errors ...
My streak ends
Published November 14, 2007
First up, the bad news: my streak of one Django-related post per day in November is going to come to an end tomorrow. Some Thanksgiving plans (technically pre-Thanksgiving by a week, but nothing wrong with celebrating a little early) I’d had which were first on, then off, and are now on again, will be taking me out of town and probably offline from tomorrow morning through Sunday night. I toyed with the idea of ...
Another django-registration update
Published October 7, 2007
This one’s just a quick heads-up, but if you’re following django-registration you’ll want to take note: I’ve been doing a series of minor releases since 0.3, and it’s now up to 0.3p5.
There have been a few bugfixes since 0.3 that you’ll want, and also some important changes:
- The example templates have been removed. They were simply causing too much hassle from expectations that they’d ...
iPod touch
Published September 30, 2007
When Steve Jobs announced the iPod touch at the beginning of the month, I knew I wanted one: it looked like the perfect little device for my assorted mobile needs. I spent a week or so thinking it over, then placed an order, and Friday morning as I was stepping out of the shower a FedEx delivery guy rang my doorbell to deliver it. I’ve spent the last couple of days playing with it ...
django-registration update
Published September 19, 2007
For those of you who are using/following it, I’ve just pushed out django-registration 0.3. The basic workflow of the application is still the same:
- User signs up for account.
- User receives activation email.
- User clicks link in email to activate account.
But under the hood quite a few things have been rearranged to make the application cleaner and more extensible, and there have been a couple of backwards-incompatible changes for anyone using ...
Django, Accelerated
Published September 4, 2007
As of yesterday, this site is served from a Joyent Accelerator, running Django via Apache/mod_python backed by a PostgreSQL database. This setup probably isn’t for everybody, but if it’s right for you (and only you can make that call), here’s how I got everything running.
First things first
Make sure you’ve taken preliminary steps to secure your Accelerator before you do anything with it; this means things like setting up ...
Honey, I’m home
Published September 3, 2007
If you’re seeing this, congratulations: the DNS changes have propagated and you’re seeing this site, in all its redesigned glory, at its new home: a Joyent Accelerator.
This took quite a bit longer than I’d expected, largely because — while ostensibly working on redesigning the site and re-writing the blog application which powers it — I kept feeling the urge to spin off various bits of functionality into their own generic, standalone applications. Now ...
A quick survey
Published July 5, 2007
As you’ve hopefully noticed if you’re following things in the world of Django, the Unicode branch merged today, which means that Django is now safe for Unicode at every level (pending any bugs which need to be fixed). That’s great news for users of Django.
But it also means that developers of Django-based applications need to be aware of how Django handles Unicode and watch out for boundaries between Django and any ...
Hacking comments without hacking comments
Published June 25, 2007
Way back when I first set up this site, and threw together a minimal blog application to power it, I didn’t bother much with enhancing Django’s comment system. But later on, when I started getting a lot of comment spam (trivia: as of this moment, 15,153 comments have been posted here, and 14,406 of them — roughly 95% — have been spam) I realized I needed to do something, and quickly hacked Django ...
django-registration update
Published May 29, 2007
I’ve just packaged up version 0.2 of django-registration; there are two big changes since the initial release which are worth mentioning (and which are, of course, covered in the documentation supplied with the download):
-
The
key_generatedfield was removed from theRegistrationProfilemodel, so you’ll want to drop the corresponding column in your database if you upgrade. - A mechanism for automatically creating custom user profiles during signup was added; check the documentation ...
Software Update
Published May 28, 2007
Back when I first launched this site (about a year ago now), I mentioned that I’d someday release the blog application I’d written to power it. So far I’ve been held up by two large problems:
- The application itself was written using an SVN checkout of Django from April of last year, back when the codebase that became the Django 0.95 release was still known as “the magic-removal branch”.
- Some features ...
Django template utilities
Published April 12, 2007
In the course of working on a couple personal projects (which will be released eventually), I found myself factoring out a lot of common code and making it more and more generic, until one day I realized I had a whole separate application just waiting to be documented and bundled.
So here it is: template_utils, a collection of generic and useful tags, filters and other tools related to Django templates. Full documentation is on the ...
One.
Published April 11, 2007
When I went to PyCon back in February, I made a silly travel mistake: I forgot to bring a razor with me, and so I didn’t shave while I was there. When I got back my face was kind of scruffy, but I’d never grown a beard before and I’ve always hated shaving, so I decided to let it grow, and grow it did. At my last haircut, a couple weeks ago ...
Quote of the day
Published April 10, 2007
Jeff is on a mission to find view functions and template tags in our software which don’t have useful docstrings (and hence don’t have useful auto-generated documentation in the Django admin). The result (copied from IRC):
<jcroft> congratulations to ubernostrum: weblogs wins the award for the most well-documented Ellington app
<jcroft> which is especially impressive, given that it’s also the one with a fuck lot more views than any other
Jeff diplomatically ...
Django snippets
Published February 25, 2007
Just in case you’re not subscribed to the Django mailing lists and/or aren’t at PyCon, today I launched a little side project I’ve been working on: djangosnippets.org, a site for Django users to share useful bits of code.
There are still a few things I’m working out (like feeds), but on the whole I’m pretty happy with it :)
PyCon 2007: the prelude
Published February 22, 2007
So, I’m in Dallas, eagerly awaiting the beginning of the non-tutorial bits of PyCon 2007; I got here around 4:15PM (after a lovely flight where I was inadvertently bumped to first-class), and already things are rocking; I just got back from dinner and drinks with some folks who are doing really cool stuff with and to Django. Already got some interesting ideas and things to continue fleshing out, and I’ve got another ...
Be liberal in your HTTP Accept…
Published January 12, 2007
Ever since I started using Joe Gregorio’s mimeparse module to help with my OpenID delegation, I’ve been treated to a first-hand tour of the various things people have thought it would be good to stuff into the HTTP Accept headers their applications send. So, naturally, I’m going to start a gallery of some of my favorites.
So far the winner in the “is that really what you meant” category is what appears ...
OpenID delegation under Django and lighttpd
Published January 8, 2007
There’s been lots and lots and lots of buzz around OpenID in the last couple weeks, which makes me happy because OpenID is a pretty darned cool system. Simon is doing all sorts of cool things, and Sam Ruby wrote up wonderful step-by-step instructions for OpenID delegation, which lets you use your own domain name to sign in with OpenID even if your OpenID is hosted somewhere else.
I sat down tonight and worked ...
Merry Christmas
Published December 24, 2006
It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting at home with my family, and the most appropriate thing I can think of to do is to quote William Makepeace Thackeray:
My song, save this, is little worth;
I lay the weary pen aside,
And wish you health, and love, and mirth,
As fits the solemn Christmas-tide.
As fits the holy Christmas birth,
Be this, good friends, our carol still:
Be peace on earth, be peace ...
Status update
Published December 10, 2006
I know I haven’t been writing much lately, and that I haven’t been keeping up with useful Django articles as much as I should be, but there are reasons for that.
So I’m going to change course a little bit and focus on some non-Django stuff for a little while. I’ve got a backlog of miscellaneous things I’ve been writing and rewriting and I’d like to get them out ...
My site is smarter than I am
Published November 22, 2006
Looking through my stats today, I found an incoming link from a blog written entirely in Chinese. Now, I don’t read Chinese (I know about half a dozen words of Mandarin, but couldn’t begin to pronounce them with the right tones), so I ran it through Babelfish and found that this person was — apparently — commenting on how “comforting” my site was to him.
This left me somewhat befuddled, until I went back and ...
Comment problems
Published November 12, 2006
So it seems that something’s broken somewhere in all the hacks I do to the comment system, because every attempt to submit a comment is now met with AkismetError: missing required argument.
I’m working on it.
Update: commenting still won’t work, but apparently I’m not the only person running into this bug. I can’t find any notes regarding changes to the Akismet API, but that feels like the most obvious ...
How I got here
Published October 16, 2006
I’m not a formally-trained programmer. I wasn’t a computer science major in college (my degree is in philosophy), and my first job after graduation didn’t involve programming (it was phone-based customer service at a health-insurance company). But here I am, developing software for a living.
I’ve never written a compiler. I’ve never hand-tuned something by dropping in bits of assembly, or even by writing C extensions for an interpreted language ...
Heads up
Published October 11, 2006
If you’re a regular reader of my blog it will be purely remedial reading, but an article I wrote about Django is up at Sitepoint as of this morning.
Go forth and spread the good word.
Tool Wars
Published September 3, 2006
A long time ago, in a land far away, there lived people who were called “carpenters”, and their jobs consisted, in part, of the following tasks:
- Cutting pieces of wood to particular sizes
- Occasionally refining those pieces of wood into particular shapes
- Putting the pieces of wood together, and making them stay together.
Now, the last one was particularly problematic, because it usually involved pounding a small metal connector — called a “nail” — through one of ...
A Web 2.0 service idea
Published August 28, 2006
One of these days, someone should start a socially-based translation service for blogs.
You see, it’s not uncommon, this being the World Wide Web, to get incoming links from articles written in languages you don’t necessarily speak; for example, my recent post about accessibility got attention from a German-language blog and, sadly, I don’t understand more than a few words of the language (I also got linked up by a French-language blog ...
Trying something new
Published August 20, 2006
Following up on yesterday’s feed subscription housecleaning, today I noticed that, if you buy a NewsFire license before day’s end you’ll get a nice bonus: Inquisitor thrown in free of charge.
Well, hot damn!
Inquisitor is really the big win for me here; I’m trying to get into the habit of using Safari as my day-to-day browser, since I’m doing lots of JavaScript stuff and — though this is in no ...
Some long-overdue cleaning
Published August 19, 2006
It had gotten out of hand and out of control. It was impossible to deal with, and impossible to do without. It was eating more and more of my time every day, and finally I just had to kick it to the curb.
That’s right, I’m talking about my feed subscription list.
The new world order
It took about half an hour, but I’ve successfully pruned and reorganized my subscription list; where ...
I’m going to predict this now
Published August 18, 2006
Assuming they’re both still on TV in 2008, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will both run for President. In different parties.
Quick note for pydelicious users
Published August 15, 2006
If, as I do, you use pydelicious to handle automatically posting links to del.icio.us, you’ll want to take note of the fact that the switch of the del.icio.us API‘s location, previously announced, has happened.
It doesn’t look like pydelicious has updated (and given the spamfest that is their Trac, I wonder if it’s being maintained), so in the meantime here’s the quick fix:
Crack open pydelicious ...
Mandy, I’m dandy
Published July 28, 2006
I don’t honestly expect any of you to remember this, but some time ago, when I posted an entry talking about Python and Ruby (on which comments are closed because the post is over a month old — hopefully this weekend I’ll get around to turning on the auto-moderation stuff I wrote up), I received a comment from one “Mandy Owens”, who seemed to think that, for both technical and marketing reasons, Rails makes ...
And away we go
Published May 18, 2006
So. That whole May 1 reboot thing? Yeah, it didn’t happen. But that’s OK, because the extra time let me get a little better run up to launching. But here I am, and here I’ll stay.
As anyone who knows me should expect, I’m now very happily powered by Django; developing the blogging app that’s behind this site was a lot of fun, and a whole lot easier than writing ...
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