Posts tagged: DJANGO

Since January 12th:

• Valid comments accepted by Akismet: 36
• Spam comments accepted by Akismet: 17
• Spam comments rejected by Akismet: 814

I don’t have a number for false positives, but given that I’ve received zero email complaints I’ll assume the number is low if not zero. This gives Akismet about a 98% success rate on catching spam, which is pretty good. It makes my life better. Having more spam comments than real comments get through the gates can be really depressing for a blog owner.

OK, this is an ugly hack. But also (possibly) cool if you’re into ugly hacks.

I’ve written a small Python script that is a fully functional, self-contained, self-starting Django application. You don’t need to put it on your PYTHONPATH or set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. You don’t need a web server. It even creates some dummy content for you. I call it jngo.py – it’s somewhat compressed.

The only prerequisites are a Unix-like operating system (i.e. I couldn’t tell you how to make it work on Windows), SQLite and a working install of Django trunk. It is fully “Works on My Machine” certified.

The latest This Week in Django podcast, out today, has an interview with me. I really enjoyed talking with Michael and Brian, and hope I didn’t come off sounding too dorky (or long-winded – I haven’t yet listened to the show, but based on the timestamps in the show notes I could probably use an edit!). I think they do a very good job with the show, and in fact I think that the structure Michael came up with – Tracking Trunk, Branching & Merging, Community Catchup, Tip of the Week – is one that other open source projects would do well to emulate in their news missives.

I launched this blog in July of 2005. It was powered by a homebrew PHP5 creation that as of today has, finally, thankfully, been laid to rest.

The other thing that started absorbing my attention in July 2005 was Django. Every month since then, I’ve thought, “You know, I should make some time this weekend to port my blog over to Django.” I was using it for everything else, after all, side projects as well as web applications at work. The word “port” was the mistake there – if I had said, “I should make some time this weekend to destroy my old blog and make a clean-slate Django version”, I probably would have gotten it done about two years ago!

I’m here in the great city of Portland, Oregon for the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON. Looks like it’s going to be a fun week.

The first two days are for “tutorials”, half-day sessions on specific practical topics. Though you are officially required to sign up for your sessions in advance, sometimes you just need to float. There’s so much going on it can be hard to choose to stay put. Plus you want to make sure you cruise the upper lobby every hour or two in case they put out a fresh batch of cookies. Also, frankly, none of the sessions I sampled in the morning really grabbed me. Not everybody who has written a book is an engaging speaker, alas. My work as a teacher makes me both more understanding and more demanding of presenters.