Development

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.

I would like to take a moment to show you how easy it is to create feeds in Django, and the easiest way to do that is by example. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to use a simplified version of a Django-powered blog.

Well, it’s official. I’ve had my first few spammers attempt to leave comments on the new site. Unfortunately for them, their efforts are to no avail. This is because I use a modified version of the Django comment application that I hacked together myself.

Well, it took a long time, but I finally finished! Welcome to the new Ministry of Intrigue. This site is now powered by Django, the marvelous Python framework many of you have heard me rave about again and again.

I would love to be writing a thorough review of Yahoo! Pipes right now. Unfortunately, when I try to visit the site I only get this error message: Yahoo’s pipes are clogged However, based on Jeremy Zawodny’s description, I have to say this sounds like one of the coolest ideas ever to hit the web.

Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of Django (which you will read my raves about again and again), has posted a wonderful meditation on how online newspapers need to change. He centers his thoughts on one central point:

So as I mentioned before I’ve been learning Python, and it has been a lot of fun. It says something that I can spend all day at work writing code, only getting up from the computer to scavenge the vending machines, but when the end of the day comes I find myself rushing home so that I can pick up where I left off in my Python lesson plan.

Well, I’m already back at my old hosting provider, Celphi. All I’ll say right now is DO NOT EVER use Dreamhost. While Dreamhost offers a stunning amount of storage and bandwidth for the money, they restrict your use of CPU time in such a way that any script-based dynamic site just simply won’t work in the long run through them.

The Ministry of Intrigue may experience some technical difficulties over the next 48 hours or so as I migrate to a new web host. Expect random outages and random errors. Hopefully it should all resolve itself fairly quickly.

I had to respectfully withdraw from the TTLB Ecosystem because the JavaScript required, which updates my status on it, was causing serious drag at load time for the blog. I no longer shall fight for my meat in that food chain, so the infuriating white screen while you wait for the Ministry to retrieve content shouldn’t happen anymore.

Seriously, this is ridiculous. It was cute at first getting the occasional spammer. I even took some delight in moderating their comments as spam and banishing them to the WordPress netherworld, but it is starting to get a little time consuming.

I finally solved a small but annoying little problem I was encountering with my domain email. You see, my ISP (evil, evil) does not let me open connections to SMTP servers outside of a certain predefined range, which my domain is beyond.

Lately I have noticed when accessing my blog that occasionally links or text in italics gets compressed against other text. It doesn’t consistently happen, and ceases upon a page refresh. I am currently trying to figure out what the hell is causing it so I can stop it, but of course now I’m wondering if this is just happening to me and if this is a quirk of my browser.

Well, I have finally started writing the DDL to build the database that the diplomacy server will run on. For a while there I was getting pretty down on myself for putting it off for so long, but as I began creating the tables I realized that all that time I spent just thinking about it has been priceless in the development process.

I am an adult, and I can admit a mistake. When I first signed up for webhosting with Logjamming, I was really excited. I liked their personality and I dug the idea of working with an independent hosting service catered to creative geeks.

Hmm, yes. I have changed my theme yet again. Almost immediately after saying I was going to stick with the last one. The last theme, while I liked it visually, it was just a little too fluid, which seemed to make the posts blend together in a weird way.

Hmm… I am liking this new look. It is still just a WordPress template, but I’ve made a few little modifications to it and written a few extra functions for WordPress to use in order to facilitate the process.