Posted by Ian Holsman
on a similar vein to Coulix’s contribution, I have written a context_processor which allow you to see what city/region/etc your visitor is coming in from
It uses MaxMind’s GeoIP database.
warning.. this module is GPL due to MaxMind’s code being GPL. putting it into your codebase will make it catch a virus.
Posted by Ian Holsman
So.. After doing my screencast covering how easy it was to get a django site up and running on webfaction I thought it would be only fair to show people how easy it was to get a rails app (typo) up and running on webfaction as well
Thanks to Remi for letting me do this.
Posted by Ian Holsman
on some shared hosting environments like webfaction they install a reverse proxy solution where you run a apache2 webserver on a custom port, and the main webserver forwards the request through to you.
This works great, and I’ve been using things like this for years, but the problem you get is that all the requests appear to be from 127.0.0.1 (or the machine which is doing the proxying for you) which isn’t the best if you want to record that stuff.
webfaction fixes this in the log files for you automatically, but that doesn’t help you if you want to do something with the IP# in django.
enter FixIP it takes the X-Forwarded-For header sent by compliant servers which holds the real IP and makes django work properly.
installation is easy.. just add the routine to your middleware settings ala
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
"django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware",
"zilbo.common.utils.middleware.fixip.FixIP",
...
Posted by Ian Holsman
on the Django user mailing list a new user (Gloria) asked a question about how to start django.
she got 10 helpful answers in the spate of 10 minutes.
the question is a common one, so I’ll re-post it here for google to find.
[...] I have decided to give Django a serious look, and I have a simple question. After running this command:> python manage.py runserver 1111 Validating models... 0 errors found. Django version 0.95, using settings 'wi_2.settings' Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:1111/ Quit the server with CONTROL-C.I expect to get to this URL from a remote machine, like this:http://dev.blah_server.com:1111
I’m sure I’m missing something simple. Please let me know what url parameter to set to access my page from a remote machine.
the answer of course is django by default only fires up the webserver on the localhost port… to override this you need to add the ip# to the command line.
> python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:1111
Posted by Ian Holsman
The screencast about installing django at webfaction has been updated and the voice quality which plagued the original has been fixed.
I’m still not 100% sure on why it happened. it was either due to me having a USB mouse installed in the other USB socket of my macbook pro, or the right-side USB adaptor on my laptop is flaky.
If anyone has any requests for screencasts (on using django) feel free to ping me, and if I have some spare time I’ll create it. (I actually enjoy doing them)
Posted by Ian Holsman
So while trying to debug a small problem with bad urls appearing in my code and other things which looked like django or mod_python had some kind of memory leak, I stumbled onto a bug in my code.
The problem I was seeing was that on forms where I create a ‘new’ object details from the previous screen were appearing, and sometimes links were using the previous’s page url were being used instead of the current one.
So after talking to One of the Python Experts, Malcom we narrowed it down to how I was using the ‘extra_context’ parameter being passed into the request.
taking a step back for a second the ‘standard’ way most people set up their urls.py is something like
context= {
'app':'forum',
}
urlpatterns += patterns('zilbo.common.tag.views.tag',
(r'^$', 'object_list', { 'queryset': Forum.forum_objects.all(),
'allow_empty':True,
'extra_context': context }),
)
my bug was that I didn’t realize that python passed ‘extra_context’ by reference. and I was blindly assigning things to it in the view itself. (updating the main copy). eg.. my code had something like
extra_context[‘forum’] = forum_obj
so when the next request came on the same thread it would have got a modified context dictionary (instead of the original one). and if my view didn’t actually set that variable (as was the case for the create view) it would take the old version. and would show the details as if it was an edit, not a create.
So the quick-fix in the code at the moment is to just copy() the extra_context where I modify it. and longer term is to treat it as a read-only variable.
hopefully the next djangoite with this problem will find this blog post and save themselves a few grey hairs
Posted by Ian Holsman
I’ve just launched 2 new ’’chatters’.
and
they follow the release of VC Chat which was soft-launched a week or two ago.
all are written in Django, and use zyons as their base.
I’ve got a couple of ideas on the boil which I will launch on those sites in about a week.. stay tuned!
Posted by Ian Holsman
I got a email recently from a local software house, to act as a mentor to them for a small project they are starting to write with Django.
In the week since I recieved the email, and actually visiting their site, they had figured out most of their issues and had their own little a skeleton of their application up and running.
The issues they were having after 1 week were:
One interesting comment they made was that they felt that django was a “niche” product, and it was mainly meant for a large publishing company. By this they meant the form handling that django offers isn’t as well developed as it could be. Adrian recently let it slip that something ‘awesome’ was in the works and well be made available soon in this area..
Posted by Ian Holsman
Django’s Internationalization support is freaking awesome. and it is so easy to use it isn’t funny.
Django’s i18n support is based on the brower sending a accept-language, or having the server set a cookie to handle the user preference.
I was in the middle of porting a legacy app for a client which didn’t work the way the designers of i18n had thought of.. they set the language in the URL itself for the request. (ie /challenge/spanish/signup.html was the spanish version of the page and /challenge/english/signup.html was the english version) .
now..this presented 2 problems. first ‘english/spanish’ are not language codes, and more importantly I wanted the server to render the page it was asked for in the language specified.. (it couldn’t trust the cookie in this instance).
so.. an easy solution at the top of each view I added a call to ‘setlang’
def setlang(request, language ):
if language == 'english':
translation.activate('en')
request.LANGUAGE_CODE = translation.get_language()
request.session['django_language'] = 'en'
elif language == 'spanish':
translation.activate('es')
request.LANGUAGE_CODE = translation.get_language()
request.session['django_language'] = 'es'
now this code isn’t ‘beautiful’ and is a bit hackish. but it met the needs of my client, and like most projects i18n was left to the end when we were had zero time..
It also has the benefit of keeping the english and spanish separate in the URL space, so google and other bots will find (and index) both languages.
other tips for i18n work (coming from a first-timer after reading the docs):
{% blocktrans %}welcometext{% endblocktrans %}
{% blocktrans %}Welcome to the new and improved version of FOO BAR.... {% endblocktrans %}
FWIW.. if you have got all your ‘trans’ and ‘blocktrans’ stuff done in the templates, it takes about 30 minutes for a complete i18n newbie to create a multi-lingual site.
FANTASTIC.
Posted by Ian Holsman
So as some of you might know, I’m doing a startup written in django in between consulting gigs.
So Far the breakdown is as follows for the month:
I’ve spent about ~10-20 hours of my time doing it, and about $30 in buying domains/hosting. At the moment I’m after growth in page views, so I’m happy(ish).