Complexity

Quickly Impersonate Another User In Your Django Project

Posted on Feb 4, 2011 - 4:06 PM Comments (0)

I've created or worked on so many Django projects in the last 4 years that I find myself completely forgetting a project or client all together. It's sort of funny. Anyways...

Too many times I've run into a situation where I, as an admin, need to impersonate another user on the system so I can verify a bug or issue that the user is experiencing. Over the years I've thrown together some internal methods to easily accomplish this.

Well I finally got fed up with the process and decided to roll out a easily re-usable Django ...

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How To Use SuperFeedr In Your Django Project Using DjPubSubHubbub

Posted on Jan 24, 2011 - 6:42 PM Comments (0)

Last year I started using an awesome service called SuperFeedr in a few projects I'm working on. Basically it's a service that notifies me when new content is available. Saves me from having to build a constant polling service to check for new data. You can read all about it on their website as they'll sell it much better than I just did ;)

Since I pretty much write everything I do in Python / Django I went looking for a Django app that supported the PubSubHubbub protocol. After a lot of searching I found there was one app ...

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How Much Do You Hate Comment Spam?

Posted on Mar 3, 2008 - 10:33 PM Comments (0)

I am so tired of dealing with comment spammers. Even though I use custom software that I wrote to run this blog, I still use the Akismet comment spam detector run by the boys & girls at Wordpress. The Akismet system is an awesome tool and catches a ton of spam for me but a good amount still gets through.

I began logging every time my software found a spam message around 6 months ago. After 2 weeks I had caught nearly 12,000 spam messages. I would sit and watch my logs just fly with spammers using custom software to ...

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Groovr Got Fancy!

Posted on Feb 18, 2008 - 4:48 PM Comments (0)

For a while I worked at a new startup here in LA called Groovr. I resigned earlier this year from Groovr but still keep in touch with the guys & gals over there. Today they launched the latest version of the website. It's been about 5 months since the last release and the features they implemented are really cool!

So what's new?

New Design - As much as I loved the last design when we rolled it out 5 months back, this new one definitely takes the cake. It is very "cool" and flows very well for the type of ...

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Ping Technorati from your Django App

Posted on Jul 14, 2007 - 9:39 AM Comments (4)

There are other articles written about this, but I felt the need to write a better one. Ahem.

Meat and potatoes time.

In your settings.py file, set 2 new variables:

# 'PING' blog indexing sites. 
PING_BLOG_INDEX = True


# List of blog index ping URL's
BLOG_INDEX = ['http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping',
              'http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2',
              'http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2']

PING_BLOG_INDEX is self explanatory. BLOG_INDEX is a list of blog XMLRPC url's that this application is going to use to notify the remote website (blog indexer) that your blog has been updated.

Let's create a new ...

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Django, metaWeblog and Amazon S3

Posted on Jun 6, 2007 - 11:11 AM Comments (1)

This is a quick write up about adding support for Amazon S3 to your Django weblog. I added support for metaWeblog API by using the this write up from All Your Pixel. Most, if not all, blogging clients support the metaWeblog API so I think it was a good choice.

Why use Amazon S3?

• It's super cheap (probably cost you less than $1/mo)


• Performance is improved by moving static media away from your Django/Apache instance.


• Amazon worries about managing and scaling the storage back end.

First off, let's edit the settings.py that is in your ...

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The iPhones Are Coming!

Posted on Jun 5, 2007 - 8:50 AM Comments (0)

Since the announcement of the Apple iPhone, the tech community has been a buzz with chatter. I saw one of the TV Ads the other day and got a little excited (read into that what you will). The phones are set to be available on June 29th, a mere 24 days away! I have to think that this will change the mobile phone business in some form. Probably not in the way that the iPod effected the music business, but I am sure it will change for the better.

There are drawbacks however. Mainly that the phone will be limited ...

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500 Internal Server Errors

Posted on Jun 2, 2007 - 7:09 PM Comments (0)

Woooooops =) In my haste last night, I accidently added a change that wasn't completed yet, and it effected individual post views. The result was an Internal Server Error, it was related to the comment form. Sorry about that, and thanks for the emails letting me know there was an issue.

Just need to remember to test as much as possible before taking newer code live. I mean it really isn't that big of a deal as this is just a personal site, but still the habit should be in place.

Technorati Tags: blog, development, geek, oops

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Boom! More Software Updates

Posted on Jun 1, 2007 - 6:22 PM Comments (0)

Just a quick post to update the status of the CMS software that is running this site now. I have added a few new features to it.

Tagging - I wrote some quick stuff to parse the Technorati tags from each post, and tag the actual entry on the back end as well. I used a simple method, just 2 models named Tag and Tagmap. Tag is the tag name itself and Tagmap is a map that puts the actual database blog entry to the Tag and vise versa. Pretty simple really, but I will write up a blog post about ...

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New Django CMS System Is Live!

Posted on May 18, 2007 - 4:48 PM Comments (2)

Well, here it is. My Django blog/cms software is alive and kicking. I spent about 3 weeks getting this together, off and on. I finally decided to bring it live, even though there is a small list of features I want to add. It currently has all the basic features a normal blog should support. Here is a TODO of what I would like to add.

• Trackback/Ping Support


• Better Post Tagging


• Multiple Client Blogging API's

I also have to give credit where it's due. The template was a free design from NodeThirtyThree. I altered it where ...

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