Greetings from Boston – specifically, BarCampBoston. My first “unconference”. Nerds galore.

The format is (mostly) half-hour talks from attendees on whatever subjects interest them – as long as other attendees have also expressed interest. It’s all tracked on a big board in the lobby. So far I’ve been in discussions involving localization, designing for technophobes, cloud computing, physics simulation in games, and Lisp. The level of interactivity is high – as is the collective expertise brought by the participants.

A significant difference between developing Django sites versus static-HTML-based approaches (among which I count PHP and the like) is that static files, aka “media”, live in a dedicated spot.

Sometimes you need a piece of static content to be available at a specific URL outside your media root. robots.txt for example. This can be done in pure Django (i.e. without even touching your Apache configuration), and is especially nice if your robots.txt content is short. The example below serves a basic “keep out” configuration.

If you use Django’s admin application, you’re familiar with its “Recent Actions” sidebar. It gives a simple summary of your latest edits, including clickable links to the relevant objects (not any ones you deleted, naturally, but ones you added or changed).

It’s probably not something you look at very often, unless you do such intensive work in the admin that you lose track of things.

Django stores that log data (via the admin’s LogEntry model) for all admin users, a fact which has caused me to repeatedly daydream about writing a custom view or two to display it. In other words, I’d like to let superusers browse all object editing history. Because sometimes you need to answer questions like “When was that changed?” and/or “Who changed it?”

In the shell, emacs is my editor of choice. However, it has one default behavior that has gotten in the way more often than it has helped – automatic generation of backup files in the same directory as the original.

Emacs is great for making quick edits to files on the web server. But I don’t want or need all those *~ files sitting around. The material is all in version control, so I can already revert to any point in history.

I run my own mail server. I don’t consider myself an especially skilled administrator, so I shouldn’t point fingers. However, in recent weeks I’ve had the following experience more than once.

1. A delivery-failure message arrives from an unfamiliar host.
2. The (quoted) orginal message is nothing I ever sent.
3. The recipient is unfamiliar to me.
4. The “sender” of the original message is an email address I control, but not one I ever send mail with.
5. OK, so this is backscatter.
6. I email the postmaster suggesting they learn how to avoid sending it.
7. The message to the postmaster bounces back because of some server misconfiguration.

Argh! Nothing spoils the catharsis of a good complaint like a bounce.