Code Koala

I figured I should probably post something since I haven't done so yet this year. I've been making several changes to the site lately. Most of them are pretty subtle, but I hope they're useful to you. Updates include

• You can now send an article to some friends by clicking on the "envelope" icon in the top-right corner of each article. It's a pretty simple mechanism.

• You can save any of...

With all of the hype that git has been receiving lately, I started playing with it a while back to see if it suited me and my wants/needs. I found it to be an interesting utility. I won't go into any details simply because I'm not really all that knowledgeable about all the ins and outs of version control systems, but I will say that I have decided I like...

I've released yet another absurdly useless application today. With all of my dirty finals lately, I needed something a little more leisurely to think about. I noticed that I put a lot of those funky smiley codes in my articles and whatnot, so I decided to beautify them a little by replacing the codes with emoticon images a la those silly forum sites I used to be crazy about as a kid.

It was...

So the other day I wrote up an article that sarcastically compared PHP and Python syntax a little. While I am completely serious when I say that I prefer Python's syntax a heck of a lot more than that of PHP, I thought it might be a good thing for me to demonstrate that the code I posted before could have been more appealing had it been thought out a little...

Some of you regulars out there may have noticed an interesting change in the presentation of some of my articles: source code highlighting. I've been interested in doing this for quite some time, I just never really got around to implementing it until last night.

I found this implementation process to be a bit more complicatd than I had anticipated. For my own benefit as well as for anyone else who wants to do...

Today I was working on a USA ePay payment module for Satchmo. I had access to some work done by another chap, but I wanted to get a better feel for what needed to be happening in the payment module, so I examined some of the stuff that other people had done as well. I studied the "official" PHP version of the payment module...

I've released a new version of django-axes this morning. This project allows you to keep track of failed login attempts on your Django-powered sites quickly and easily. It pays attention to the built-in login functions for the Django administration utility as well as the stock django.contrib.auth.views.login method. If a particular user fails to login successfully after 3 tries (this number is customizable), a record is made...

With the recent release of Python 3.0 final, I've had a crazy itch that needed to be scratched. That itch, my friends, was to do a write-up of how to install Python 3.0 alongside my existing Python 2.5.2 installation without borking things up. The reason I thought it would be useful is that I'm running a Debian-based distribution of Linux called sidux right now, and neither Python...

I've been making several updates to django-watermark during my more boring classes the past couple days. I have just released a new version for your pleasure.

Changes include:

• A lot of code refactoring. There was a lot of logic in the watermark filter itself. I decided this logic should be placed elsewhere so as to make the utils.watermark function easier to use outside the...

I've added a few updates to django-watermark and figured it was time to announce another release. Updates include:

• the ability to place watermarks randomly on the target image
• updated the way relative positioning works. Now, position=50%x50% will center the watermark image on the target image. Previously django-watermark placed the top-left corner of the watermark image in the center of the target image.
• the ability to convert the watermark...

This little trick certainly isn't anything special. Several other folks have posted about how to have Django send out an e-mail automagically when a new comment has been posted on your site. However, a lot of these other posts seem to be pre-Django 1.0. Some groovy changes took place with the signal system slightly before Django 1.0 was released, so I thought I'd share my method of having Django notify me by...

I recently had a good friend of mine ask for some help in adding a captcha field to his comments form. I gave him some pointers, but before he could put them into action he had to leave for a Thanksgiving roadtrip home. I didn't give much mind to the idea of putting captchas on my own site since it's not all that popular amongst spammers yet. When I woke up this...

I've been working on updating all of my articles to use ReStructured text formatting these past couple of days. Basically ever since I started using Django on my personal sites, I used Textile formatting to make my articles look pretty, and it treated me well. However, I found myself with a few extra minutes to do some research this weekend, and the topic I happened to research was the difference between ReStructured text,...

The Django team has once again announced a new release of their absolutely amazing framework. Right on schedule, version 1.0.1 has been made available to the world. This release packs over two hundred fixes over the original Django 1.0 codebase. I'm in the process of upgrading my sites right now!

For more information, see the following links:

• Release announcement
• Release notes
• List of issues addressed in...

Here's yet another application to help you make your site more useful to your users. django-reploc is a "representative locator" for Django-powered Web sites. It uses the Google Maps API to offer your users an interactive map of your representatives, vendors, friends, houses, etc.

I built this application to be a dealer locator for one of my clients. The application provides a way for you to create "representatives," and each...

Up until a couple weeks ago, I had never installed a FavIcon on any of my Django sites. I never really thought about it until one day I enabled the SEND_BROKEN_LINK_EMAILS setting for one of my sites. As soon as I did that, I was able to track down links to broken pages very quickly. It also notified me that I didn't have a favicon.ico file...

Ever curious to see information about failed login attempts on your site? This morning I threw together a small, simple Django application that allows you to do just that. I'm calling this project django-axes, which is pronounced as "jango access".

I've only tested it on my own site, so it must still undergo some more in-depth testing before I can call it a stable application. From my testing, however, it...