SDJournal http://www.sdjournal.com/ Software development weblog en-gb Copyright (c) 1999 - 2005, Michael Josephson http://backend.userland.com/rss091 The only metric in software development http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/250 : Bill Gates on software development:
« There's only really one metric to me for future software development, which is -- do you write less code to get the same thing done? »
]]> Exhedra: a conferencing/forum application in Django http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/248 this category are also syndicated on the Django Community page. Rather than clutter up that page with multiple posts about this project I've set up a separate weblog to cover it. ]]> Django IRC logs to the rescue http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/242 Tried all URL patterns but didn't find a match for /admin when requesting the admin URL. A search of the IRC logs for #django revealed that for it to work the settings module must be set to .admin so if you're using myproject.settings.main for the working with the model in the first tutorial you'll need --settings=myproject.settings.admin. ]]> Getting the Subway Noteboard example up and running http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/240 After taking a first look at Subway a few weeks ago I've been doing a bit more work with it today in terms of getting the NoteBoard example app up and running.

I already had some of the dependencies installed (Python 2.4, Cheetah 0.9.17, MySQL, mysqldb) so I needed:

and then it was just a case of getting the latest version of subway itself.

These all install using the familar python setup.py install approach. After that the example can be started up by going into the examples/noteboard directory and running python scripts/start_server.py.

The one thing that did catch me out at first is that some of the .html templates are saved with CRLF line endings and these needed to be converted before things would work correctly under Linux. (this is mentioned in this posting to subway-devel.) The symptoms for this were receiving a from site import site ImportError: cannot import name site when trying to request the root page for the app. ]]> Django Framework http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/241 lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. It has recently been made available under a BSD license and already a community is building around it. It seems to be focused on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.

Looks like Adrian Holavity and Jacob Kaplan-Moss are the guys behind it.

Update: From the FAQ, the other Django developers are Simon Willison (whose weblog I've been reading for a long time) and Wilson Miner. ]]> WELL Blogs tweaks and feedparser upgrade http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/229 WELL Blogs to use the the latest version of feedparser. This newer version of the parser provides feed content in Unicode so I've updated the bot to encode things in UTF-8.

I've also made a few other enhancements to deal with variations in the flavours of RSS an Atom such as supporting summaries. ]]> OnDemandAmazonList http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/228 Leonard Richardson recently emailed me a copy of OnDemandAmazonList, which can be used in conjection with PyAmazon to iterate over the results of an Amazon search as though it were a normal list.

Normally it's necessary to fetch the results from Amazon in batches by specifying a different value for the page parameter. Leonard's class abstracts this away by returning you results one at a time via the iterator's next() method which silently fetches the next lot of results from Amazon on demand as required.

This class can be downloaded from the Contributed Code section of the PyAmazon page. ]]> Erik's Linkblog: Tuesday, October 26, 20... http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/222 Erik's Linkblog: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 ]]> PyBloglines 0.02 http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/211 listsubs. ZIP and .tar.gz versions are available on the project page. ]]> Google Desktop http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/208 Google Desktop lets you search local documents, emails, IM chat history etc. via a browser based interface. ]]> Laszlo: Rich UI platform open sourced. http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/187 Laszlo: Rich UI platform open sourced. ]]> Open Workbench http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/184 Open Workbench: Open-source alternative to Microsoft Project. ]]> Ruby on Rails http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/180 Rails:

« Rails is an open source web-application framework for Ruby. It ships with an answer for every letter in MVC: Action Pack for the Controller and View, Active Record for the Model.

Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files. »

]]> Hello World in Firefox http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/181 writing extensions for Firefox. ]]> Bug Reporting Best Practices http://www.sdjournal.com/archives/182 Bug a very comprehensive post on what makes a good bug report. ]]>