I have a webserver with 3 WSGI applications running on different domains (1, 2, 3). All deployed with a combination of Gunicorn and NGINX. A combination that works really well, but there are two annoyances that are only going to get worse the more sites I deploy:

A) The configuration for each server resides in a different location on the filesystem, so I have to recall & type a long path to edit settings. continue reading…

Google Analytics and kin are great for getting stats on your visitors, but often I simply want to know: who is linking to my site? You can deduce this from web server logs, but server logs tend to be too noisy and a make it hard to pick out the referer URLs.

Moya doesn't have a stats library yet, but it's not hard to MacGuyver up a solution to log incoming links. We need to run some code on every request so that we can detect the referer and write a log message. The simplest way to do that is to create a <url> tag with a wildcard route of “/*”. We can add this <url> to the mountpoint of the site library (the site library is where we customize various aspects of the site). Here's the code:

Yes, referer is a misspelling, but it has been codified in to the http spec! continue reading…

I recently implemented a Sublime Text like fuzzy matching for my encrypted notes app. Fuzzy matching is a really nice feature that I haven't seen used outside of code editors.

If you haven't used Sublime Text, the fuzzy matching is used to quickly open files. Rather than navigate directories in the UI – which can laborious – the open file dialogue uses the characters you type to filter a list of paths. Each character you type must match a character in the file path exactly once and and in the same order as they appear in the path. For instance the search “abgvi” would match “/application/blog/views”, as would “blgview”. The basic idea should work with any text, not just paths. continue reading…

The last two weekends I scratched a web development itch. I've been using KeepNote to store notes for years now. It's a nice simple desktop app, which I use to store details such as past addresses, account numbers, phone numbers etc. And more sensitive information like PIN numbers and passwords.

I configured KeepNote to store notes in Dropbox so that I don't risk losing anything. This has worked quite well, but I've always been frustrated that (a) I can't access my notes on my mobiles devices, and (b) I'm relying on a third party to keep my secrets. continue reading…