We use Windows desktops at work, but naturally nowadays even our customers expect web sites to be deployed to Linux servers. Here’s a couple of things I learned in the process of deploying a Django app from my workstation—running Windows 7—to a development server running Debian GNU/Linux 5 ‘lenny’. Read more
This was originally going to be part of my note on porting from Windows 7 to Debian 5 ‘lenny’, but I split it off in to a separate post. Read more
One of the requests for the new Jeremy Day site was to have her LiveJournal copied to the front page. My first thought was to use jQuery’s wrapper around XMLHttpRequest to pull in the Atom feed and process that with XSLT—but I had forgotten the ban on cross-site requests. I decided the correct solution was to get my own proper server at last, so I could host a cached copy of the LiveJournal page there. (I have since been told that it is possible to instead use some gadget from Yahoo.) Read more
Work on jeremyday.org.uk, the replacement for www.jeremydennis.co.uk continues apace. I’ve used spreadsite to create a projects list (which needs updating), created a new version of the The Weekly Strip archive, and had a long talk to Jamie Lokier about how caching should work on GNU/Linux systems and the WWW in general. Also I have created a new Atom feed for TWS. Read more
I think that I have got http://jeremyday.org.uk/ version 1 finished (obviously Jeremy has the final word on whether this is the case), and I have set up the old www.jeremydennis.co.uk to redirect to the new site.
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I said in an earlier article I would outline my Django deployment recipe. This is largely derived from a recipe for Deploying A Django Site Using FastCGI in the Django Advent site. Read more
One of the differences between Django and many older web application platforms such as PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, etc., is that it has no implicit URL routes: every URL that is handled by your Django site is handled by matching it in a URLconf. And this is a good thing. Read more
I have created a web app called Texturejam to host remixes of Minecraft texture packs. The idea is to host Texturepacker in a form palatable to people who might want to use it. Read more
Today is the traditional date for announcing improbable projects and absurd collaborations, so here’s mine. Kanbo is a task board based vaguely on the boards used in agle-development approaches like Scrum and Kanban (and variations with names like Scrum-ban, Lean, Agile, and what-have-you). Read more
The plan with Kanbo is to skip having priority fields for tasks and instead to just let the cards be rearranged in whatever order you like. This poses a couple of technical challenges: first, the only nice user interface for rearranging things is drag-and-drop, and second, relational databases are notoriously wedded to the idea that entities are an unordered set, so how should the order be represented? Read more
I have discovered that whenever the name MySQL is mentioned, someone will make a choking gurgling noise and complain that it isn’t PostgreSQL. Now that MySQL has been consumed by Sun, which has in turn been consumed iby Oracle, I thought I would see how hard it is to switch. Read more
On my server I use D. J. Bernstein’s Daemontools package to run the servers for my web sites (other services are automatically installed in to the init or init.d directories).
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One of the principles I am following with Kanbo is that it is not intended to replace your existing task tracker, assuming you have one. Instead the plan is to extract just enough information to display the task board with draggable cards and leave task descriptions, comments, risk assessments, estimates, etc., to your existing tracker. For this to work we need to be able to link to the othe tracker. Read more
In my previous article I showed off 14 old CAPTION web site designs. Here’s a little about CAPTION 2012. Read more
Django 1.4 introduces two big changes that require thinking about: (1) support for time zones, (2) removing some magic about where app modules go on disk. This is as good a time as any to update the layout of my Django projects. Read more
When designing forms for web sites that accept postcodes or similar, it should be the web site, not the user, who has to convert it in to a canonical form that is easy to store and process. Read more
My web site settings file is broken so I might as well fix a few things. Read more
I have switched to Gunicorn since my attempts to make uWSGI multilingual have failed disastrously. Read more
Now I have upgraded to Python-3, porting my site to Django 2.0 was pretty straightforward. Read more
My latest experimental web server needs a task queue to do asynchronous processing. Here’s how I deploy Celery on my Ubuntu server. Read more
Here’s a quick note about how to write tests for Django models that need to queue Celery tasks when they are created. Read more
New side project: I am working on a microblogging app called Ooble. The aim is to be able to replace my use of Tumblr for linking to web pages I find interesting and making short notes. Read more