It's All Geek to Me

Moya's template language is a spiritual successor to Django, and Jinja templates. It borrows a number of constructs from both, and adds a few of its own.

There is a slight difference in the syntax in that variables are substituted with ${variable} rather than {{ variable }}, but tags still use the familiar {% tag %} syntax.

Template languages are generally quite extensible, so there is probably nothing that Moya templates can do that Django / Jinja can't (via a plugin or extension), but there are a few things which are I think are more elegant in Moya's templates language (and built-in). I'm going to talk about a few of them in this post.

How often have you written code like this? continue reading…

My client, WildFoundry, is looking for an experienced Python developer to join us. We work in the field of IoT, and you will get to work with a variety of really cool technologies. Here's the job description:

WildFoundry is seeking a senior Python web application developer on a 8 month contract to help us in the development of the dataplicity Internet-of-Things platform (dataplicity.com). You would be expected to work from your home or own office most of the time and very high quality candidates based in Slovakia, Poland and the United Kingdom will be considered.

This is an unbeatable opportunity to work from home, earn excellent rates and join in with fast growing projects. continue reading…

This screencast demonstrates how to build a database driven, Markdown powered wiki from scratch in around 25 lines of code. Lines of code is of course a poor metric, but I think the end result of part 1 (more planned) packs quite a lot of functionality for what is very simple and readable code. I'll be building on this code in future screencasts, to create something which is more feature complete.

I found creating this to be a challenge; thinking, typing and talking is about 50% more things than I can do at once! Hopefully I'll master it as I go.

For more information on Moya, please see www.moyaproject.com.

Today I released v0.5.14 of Moya, my no-Python Python web framework.

The no-Python probably needs some explaining… Moya is written in Python, and can be extended in Python, but runs web applications written in an interpreted language called Moya code (name is uninspired, I know).

This release was primarily driven by development of Bean Counter, a web app that manages virtual currency. Essentially it's online banking for internet based ‘money’, intended for use as a community currency.

In tandem with this release I've also added a couple of re-usable libraries which, I think, add a significant amount of value to Moya. The first is Moya Logins which creates OAuth Sign In buttons, i.e. Sign In with Google etc. The second is Moya Auto, which adds AJAX powered auto-completion to form inputs. continue reading…

Nat Dunn of Webucator has created the following video based on my post about Sublime Text Fuzzy Matching with Javascript:

There's a lot more interesting content on his Webucator channel. I recommend checking it out!

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…