About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 71104 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Watching logs

I have a webserver with about a dozen active domains. Sometimes I want to take a quick look at the ongoing action on a particular domain. I have an alias called "watchlog" that takes the domain name as an argument. It shows me the last 25 lines of the log for that domain and then new ones as they come, until I kill it.

It's a tcsh alias (sorry, bash users):

alias watchlog tail -f -n 25 /usr/local/www/domains/\!:1/logs/access_log

(Obviously this depends on a setup where domain folders are named after the domains themselves, with logfiles in consistent relative locations with standard names.)

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005
tips + webservers