After reading the comments on my last post on the subject, I realized there was definitely some room for improvement in my strategy. This is take two of the original post.
Problems
My original strategy had a couple of downfalls:
Poisoning the Python Path
I was adding directories to the Python Path that weren’t Python. This raised the chance of namespace collision and just wasn’t a very clean way to do things.
No project source repository
I was still storing all my source files in one big folder. Tracking which project is using what was more difficult than it needed to be.
Solutions
The first step to recovery was forgetting about sharing libraries between projects altogether. In theory it sounds great, in practice it was cumbersome to manage. My directory structure now looks like this:
Gondola is our content management system built on top of Django. I briefly showed it off during my DjangoCon Lightning Talk, but have been wanting to give it a proper screencast for a while. Here’s an introduction:
A few common questions I don’t tackle in the screencast:
Is this an open source project?
As of right now, no. I do plan on spinning off a few bits as open source over time. In fact, the WYSIWYG editor is already on Google Code as django-admin-uploads. Unfortunately it hasn’t been synced up with our in-house code in a while and isn’t working on 1.0. We’ll get that updated at some point in the near future.
How much will it cost?
I haven’t settled on a pricing structure yet, but I want it to be affordable for small businesses.
September 18, 2008 |
django, presentation, trailmapping |
2 comments
DjangoCon was an amazing conference all around. I met some great people and learned a lot. I also had the opportunity to get up on stage and present some of the things I’ve been working on here. I was really nervous and after seeing how well prepared the presenters before me were, I had doubts about my plan to go on stage and wing it. I spoke about Trailmapping and Gondola the CMS I’ve been working on.
Afterwards, I was blown away by the number of compliments I received. A few people told me they thought my talk was the best of the bunch which was really encouraging. To everyone that reached out, all I can say is thanks; it meant a lot. I’m inspired to carve out some more time to blog about the things I’m working on, specifically Django admin customization and jQuery.
A friend is in the process of setting up a new slice at everbody’s favorite VPS provider Slicehost and asked for some advice. I use MySQL, Nginx & Apache/mod_wsgi on Ubuntu to serve Django. I think Slicehost’s Articles are awesome and a great place to get help you get everything installed and running, so for this article, I’ll focus on some personal preferences regarding directory structure and repo management.
One of the biggest difficulties I’ve had to tackle lately is the rapid progress of Django. I have a number of client sites hosted on my slice and have had to freeze them at certain times when backwards incompatible changes come along. My original approach made this really messy, because I only accounted for having one copy of any given third party repo, symlinked from /usr ...
July 20, 2008 |
django, trailmapping |
11 comments
All the recent hubbub about 1 week and 1 day application development, motivated me to see how quickly I could launch a website for myself. I, like many developers, struggle with building and releasing personal sites. Ask a web developer and they’re likely to tell you about a couple of sites they started and never finished. Time is always an issue, but the bigger problems are striving for perfection prior to launch and always holding out for that one “killer” feature. As time goes on, interest in the project wanes until it finally gets shelved.
The Plan
Prior to development, I set a few goals for myself:
Launching quickly was priority number one. I set a goal of 3 days.
Use as much existing code as possible. Even if it wasn’t a perfect fit, if it was functional, use it.
Lincoln Loop has been in “head down” mode for the last couple months. In addition to being knee deep in client projects, we have grown from a one-man development studio to a full-fledged Django development shop/consultancy. We are proud to announce that Lincoln Loop is the first (that we know of) company focusing solely on Django application development. Our development team is currently five strong and oozing with talent. Each member contributes to the community in blog posts or open source add-ons; a few of us have contributed code to Django itself. More on our dev team in the near future.
We went through the typical growing pains during the transition, but the kinks are worked out and we can officially say that we are open for business. Django projects big and small, send them our way. Our devs can handle nearly anything.
Lately, we’ve been taking over projects from people who began building their first site in Django, but either got in over their head or just found they didn’t have the time to continue. As I review the existing code, the first issue I typically see is using the render_to_response shortcut without including the RequestContext, preventing context processors from being used in the templates. The standard symptom is when people can’t access MEDIA_URL in their templates.
Here are a few ways to add RequestContext to your templates.
Option #1: Adding RequestContext to render_to_response
The Django documentation recommends passing RequestContext as an argument to render_to_response like this:
For those of you that have been hiding under a rock for the last 12 hours, App Engine is Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services. While it is less flexible in some senses (you don’t have a complete OS at your disposal), it does provide tighter integration for web applications and even includes a (somewhat crippled) version of Django out of the box.
I’m pretty excited about this mainly because I’m not a big fan of server administration, so I took a couple hours this morning to test it out. Here are some quick notes:
One of the things that drew me towards Django was the idea of being able to create reusable applications that would sit on my PYTHONPATH instead of copied across multiple sites. Coming from WordPress, the constant security updates that required me to revisit old projects began to drive me mad.
Trouble in Paradise
With some real world Django experience under my belt, I find myself re-using apps all the time, but not how I originally expected. A fair amount of my client work comes from building content management systems, so I started out building a generic app like flatpages but more extendable and a blogging app. I dropped them in my PYTHONPATH and started adding them to INSTALLED_APPS on my projects.
Over time, they evolved and improved, but they started to handcuff me. I started thinking things like, “This would be a great feature for Project X, but it would ...
Download "django-cpserver":http://lincolnloop.com/static/uploads/django_cpserver.zip Now at "GitHub":http://github.com/lincolnloop/django-cpserver
Background
A few months ago, I got sick of trying to deploy Django sites on my cPanel server and got a VPS at Slicehost. Thanks to SuperJared, setting up Apache/mod_python behind an Nginx frontend was a snap.
I started deploying and migrating sites to the new server and kept an eye on my server resources via Munin. I had about 10 sites running on a 1GB Slice, but the Apache processes were hogging all the RAM. Restarting Apache would bring memory usage down to around 500MB, but within a couple of hours, it would be using all my available RAM, with individual proceesses using as much as 120MB.
I started asking questions and trying different options including mod_wsgi, verifying projects weren’t in debug mode, etc. Nothing made a difference.
Here’s a little nugget I just posted to Django Snippets. It emulates the behavior of an old Perl script I used way back when, FormMail.pl.
I often find myself needing to build a form whose contents get emailed to the site owner(s). This class let’s you call form.notify() on any form that is a subclass of it to have the fields ordered and sent in a plain text email to all users that are flagged as staff.
fromdjangoimportnewformsasformsfromdjango.contrib.auth.modelsimportUserfromdjango.contrib.sites.modelsimportSitefromdjango.core.mailimportsend_mailclassFormMail(forms.Form):defnotify(self):""" Sends an email to all members of the staff with ordered list of fields and values for any form that subclasses FormMail """site_name=Site.objects.get_current().nameform_name=self.__class__.__name__subject='%s%s Submission ...
The newforms library is a huge time-saver, but when I first started using it, I still found myself writing tedious repetitve code to get it to function how I wanted. While I could get away with it on smaller sites, I recently built a site with some big forms on it and decided to improve my process.
HTML Rendering
First off, {{ form }} or {{ form.as_p }}, rarely cut it in real world apps. We need to be able to customize our forms to improve the layout or add extra information. I started using inclusion tags to render the form fields and labels. Here is my trivial inclusion tag:
@register.inclusion_tag('_display_field.html')defdisplay_field(field,alt_label=''):""" Print HTML for a newform field. Optionally, a label can be supplied that overrides the default label generated for the form. Example: {% display_field form.my_field "My New Label" %} """ifalt_label:field.label=alt_labelreturn{'field ...
March 10, 2008 |
django, portfolio |
No comments yet.
We recently built and launched CashOffersFast.com. It gives people an easy, no-risk way to put their home up for sale. Pre-qualified investors can then make anonymous bids on any home listed with the site.
We worked very closely with the owner of the site to convert his concept into a working web application. From the initial concept, we identified the minimal set of features necessary for the site to function, then took an iterative approach to quickly deliver those features. This allowed the owner to use our working copy for presenting the site to potential investors while we were in the middle of the development cycle.
The site is built in Django and was designed by Derek at ashwebmedia.
March 7, 2008 |
company news, django |
No comments yet.
I’ve been wanting to update my website for quite a while. It got to the point that I wasn’t referring people to my old site because it had become such a poor representation of what Lincoln Loop has evolved into. I’ve also been bottling up a bunch of blogging I want to do about Django for the same reasons.
I set my sights on relaunching before this weekend and my first trip to SXSW. Since I’ll probably do more industry schmoozing there than I have in all the time I’ve been freelancing, I wanted to make sure I had a site I was proud to show off. While the site is still rough around the edges, it is done enough that I am comfortable putting it into production. Once I settle back in, I’m hoping to use this site as a platform to become ...
February 20, 2008 |
company news |
No comments yet.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of switching hosting providers for a while. I finally took the plunge and if you’re reading this, it is being served off the new platform. I’m going to be eating my own dog food for a few weeks along with a select few clients before officially deciding to move everything over.
If you notice any issues with my site or email, please let me know asap.
Progress bars are meant to indicate progress. When they sit in one place for 20+ minutes, it makes people think progress has stopped and something is broken. I shouldn’t have to check my running processes to see if it’s still working.
September 28, 2007 |
django, portfolio |
No comments yet.
A few weeks ago, I released Prudential Steamboat Realty’s new site into the wild. It is my first (but not last) large site built in Django to go live. As usual, ashwebmedia did a great job on redesigning the site and building the user interface.
Prudential gave me the opportunity to scrap their existing property search and build a new one from the ground up. When I’d used local real estate searches in the past, I found them to be pretty poor from a design and user interface standpoint. I took my insight as an end-user along with Prudential’s input to create a more pleasant search experience for their visitors. The initial feedback we have received has been very positive.
In order to keep the search easy to use while still giving “power-users” access to lots of options, I used quite a bit of unobtrusive JavaScript (via ...
September 10, 2007 |
company news |
No comments yet.
I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Lincoln Loop, LLC has become a completely carbon neutral business.
Our footprint was pretty minimal to start. Our shared server, Olivia, only draws about 180 watts or 1 ton of CO2 a year by my best calculation. Since I don’t travel at all for business, the only other energy is the home office.
I was able to purchase wind energy directly from our local electric co-op, so the home office was easy. It will tack on about $20/month to my electric bill, but will cover most of the energy our household uses. For me, that is money well spent.
Getting the server carbon neutral was another story. Multiple conversations with the data center regarding purchasing renewable energy led nowhere. So, for now, I’ve decided to offset 2 tons of CO2 (should cover external cooling and some ...
Our first iPhone development project hit the App Store last week and is already over 1k users! Check them out @takemyspot #iphone #geodjango
Pete, 2 months ago
Troubleshooting OpenID is just like user/password. Except you have 5 of them and and you don't know which one is failing, and 3 login pages
Pete, 2 months, 2 weeks ago
I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Lincoln Loop, 
