Where there is a Will

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…

I never intended to write a template system for Moya. Originally, I was going to offer a plugin system to use any template format you wish, with Jinja as the default. Jinja was certainly up to the task; it is blindingly fast, with a comfortable Django-like syntax. But it was never going to work exactly how I wanted it to, and since I don't have to be pragmatic on my hobby projects, I decided to re-invent the wheel. Because otherwise, how do we get better wheels? continue reading…

The feed for this Blog has been broken for a while. I knew it was down; somebody was kind enough to alert me on twitter. I've been procrastinating fixing it because a) the Django code I wrote to power this blog is old and crusty, and b) I've been busy with another project. I only got around to fixing it now, because I have something to announce. Stay tuned.

Can't believe the last time I posted a blog was 2013. Where does time go.

My client is looking to hire a new Python developer, initially for an 8 month contract. It's a home working position, we communicate mostly via Skype / email / gtalk etc. Although we do meet up in meatspace from time to time, so ideally a candidate would be in the London / Oxford area.

You will be working with your truly. The projects I've been working on are in the server side of web-enabled devices. The web interface is written in Django, so you'll need the usual battery of front-end technologies; HTML, CSS, Javascript etc. We have a Twistd server which communicates with devices in the field, that my client produces. In the middle we have dynamic user interface generation from XML. continue reading…

Here's a Python gotcha that I spent some time tracking down. I'm writing it up in the spirit of saving developers a debugging headache in the future.

I had an integer with a single bit set, and I wanted to find the index of that bit. For example, 4 in binary is 00000100. The 1 is at the third position from the right, which should give an index of 2 – since the first position is 0.

You can do this in two ways; either check each bit in turn until you find a 1, or you can use math as a shortcut. I chose the math solution:

Simple right? Finally staying awake in high school maths paid off. So simple that it was the last bit of code I suspected to be broken (spoiler: it was). continue reading…

After today's news that the <blink> tag will be deprecated in Firefox, I decided to re-implement it in html5 / CSS3 (no Javascript required). Now it's all modern again, you are free to use <blink> liberally in your web application.

Be sure to give attribution for the above code, so your users will know where to go to thank me…

Edit: Just to demonstrate that it works!

Inspect the code if you don't believe me...