Development

Thanks to this post from Adam Johnson, I’ve now updated my configuration to block OpenAI and Meta from crawling this website to feed their LLMs.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. The last few work weeks have been so busy that by the end of the Friday work day I’ve been too tired to write a post. But I’m back home after a week overseas and it’s a long weekend, so let’s use this opportunity to catch up.

Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists.

I’m personally skeptical that LLMs provide enough benefit to outweigh their potential harm, and so I deeply appreciate those who are attempting to make them work without relying on pixie dust.

Here’s the scenario you find yourself in: you’ve built and deployed a cool little Django app, and successfully deployed it on Heroku. You’ve followed all the great advice out there and are using django-environ to help manage all the various configuration variables you have to retrieve from your Heroku dynos.

I’ve written here before about one of my side projects, a suite of productivity tools for writers called Writer’s Ledger. The idea began from a desire to convert the spreadsheets I use for tracking manuscripts to a reusable web app.

I’m happy to report that this site now produces a valid JSON feed for your consumption. If you are using one of the few feedreaders that support them, that is.

Get Pelican: it’s good! There comes a time in every young man’s life when he begins to neglect his digital lawn, and the weeds grow so thick you wouldn’t think there was any home there at all.

I do so love to tinker… One thing that has annoyed me about using a static site generator for my blog has been the lack of scheduled posts. It’s a feature I relied on quite a bit back when I used Wordpress, and also when I built my custom Django CMS.

Iteration is the thing. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. After all, tinkering is easy to do, especially when you are working with a platform as flexible as Jekyll. So as you would expect, I’ve made several changes to the site since the initial relaunch.

As previously discussed, I recently switched to Octopress on this site. I’ve been pretty happy with that decision thus far. Performance is good thanks to static files. It’s a joy to compose in Markdown, preview it on my own machine, and then deploy to my site.

This site is now powered by Octopress. The tentacles compell you! It’s tentacly delicious ! The Search> The Search # As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been looking to try out a new CMS for this site.

Macieg Ceglowski breaks down what happened during the mass exodus from Delicious and how the Pinboard team dealt with the huge influx of users that resulted from that event. It’s a great analysis of how they coped the traffic increase, and what kinds of measures they needed to take in order to scale to meet the new demand.

Bleach is a rather clever Python module for sanitizing HTML input and auto-linking URLs. It uses a whitelist for the allowed elements and attributes (thank God), and will avoid trying to “linkify” URLs that are already within an anchor element.

After lots of hard work, some swearing, and lots of patience on the part of my wife, Version 3.0 of this site is now live. It’s been a long journey, but getting it done has been very satisfying.

Google has released their own programming language, appropriately named Go. I haven’t had time to dig deeply into this yet, but I’m seeing some interesting stuff that I like such as fast compilation, garbage collection, easy to read syntax, built in support for multicore machines and of course an open source BSD-style license.

I have not been posting here much of late, which is partly due to the amount of stuff I’m working on, and partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing and posting stuff in other places around the web, since it is easier.

Photo by golfer4life under a Creative Commons license. I’ve had to shut off commenting functionality for the time being folks. The spammers have been trying hard to get in, and the code that I’ve written to run comments though Akismet for spam checking is occasionally resulting in a spinning process on the server if it gets too many requests.

Via Simon Willison: This is a real cool Django app that creates an awesome interface to help internationalize your site. Allows the adminstrator, and an optional group of designated translators to read and write your site’s gettext files.

Heh, I had a little fun this afternoon writing a little Django app for my site that will regularly import my public Pownce notes and allow me to display them in the sidebar.