Python

Another two week recap! Travel, site improvements, python, and podcasting; oh my!

At this rate I might have to rename this segments to Monthnotes. So let’s at least talk about the last two weeks, shall we? Python, podcasting, media, oh my.

I’ve been toying with a small Django project that can be given a list of podcast feeds, and then regularly checks those feeds and updates some interesting metrics. Initially, I wanted to see how many comparable podcasts to my own made use of various RSS namespace elements, and also to pull some aggregate statistics around release frequency, episode length, etc…

In which we semi-automate an annoying production task away with the powers of Python, curiousity, and ADHD hyperfocus.

This week I wanted to play around with tkinter a bit. But this proved to be difficult on my M2 Mac. I use asdf to manage various runtime versions, so first I checked to see if it was already working with my existing Python installation using the built in test method.

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.

I’m a big fan of using direnv to set project-specific env variables. And at one point I was using it to automatically activate my poetry virtualenv whenever I entered the directory per this function.

I realize it’s actually Tuesday, but it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these weeknotes, so here we go! Over the course of the last week: Finished watching Brand New Cherry Flavor on Netflix, which was an outstanding horror miniseries.

A few months ago, I came across this post by Simone Silvestroni explaining how they implemented a styled and human-readable RSS feed for their Jekyll-powered blog. I really liked the idea and wanted to implement it on my own site for browsers that don’t automatically offer to subscribe to a given feed.

This week has been both incredibly busy, but also frustrating vague on things I can share. It doesn’t help that I’ve had a cold kicking my ass for the last few days.

This week in the world of Daniel: Released two new versions of django-quotes. Those are focused around making the app more flexible for lots of users, and some developer help with typing annotations.

Python 3.10 introduced several improvements for type hints, including a much more concise Union operator. This means that instead of using: def square(number: Union[int, float]) -> Union[int, float]: return number ** 2 You can instead write this:

This week in the world of Daniel: I updated my quote service project to use my reusable django-quotes app. This should make maintenance easier. Since this is a backwards-incompatible change, I also updated ewdiscordbot and ewtwitterbot to use the new API endpoints.

I was hacking on my quote service the other day, and notice that Read the Docs wasn’t building my module level documentation, which meant that anyone that wanted to look at said modules in more detail was getting a 404 error.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Greg Gaughan has put together a rather clever Python script that can take a pipe created and hosted on Yahoo! Pipes into a Python module. The resulting file allows you to run your pipe directly from your computer as opposed to relying on Yahoo!