development

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.

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.

Michael Trier points out a cool new feature in Django that is awesome for debugging. On Django error pages (with DEBUG turned on) there is now a button that will automatically post the contents to dpaste.

Hopefully not too many people tried to stop by the site today, because I had a pretty severe outage due to my own foolishness. I’ve been trying to implement a few new features to the site, and in one particularly bad move I managed to wipe an important file that isn’t stored in my SCM because it is server dependent.

This is old news that I remember hearing about on Buzz Out Loud. I want to alpha test the engine code as soon as it released. :-) Interesting that if you view their random samples that the majority of them come from YouTube.

<clears throat> This is actually just a short post to warn you that there will be a pretty major overhaul to the site in the near future. The majority of this will consist of a redesign to improve readability, as well as making the site play nicer with mobile browsers, specifically Opera Mobile and WebKit.