Ben Timby has committed code to PyFilesystem that lets you expose any filesystem over FTP. We've had the ability to serve filesystems over SFTP (secure ftp) and XMLRPC for a while, but plain old FTP was a glaring omission–until now.

You can serve the current directory programatically with something like the following:

The same functionality is also available to the fsserve command. The following is equivalent to the above code, but from the command line:

You'll probably need root privileges (i.e. sudo) on Linux for these examples.

With the server running, you can browse the files on your home directory with an ftp client, or by typing “ftp://127.0.0.1” in to your browser. Any of the other supported filesystems can be served in the same way. continue reading…

I made currency site available for testing today. See my previous post for the back-story, but in essence currency site is a virtual currency platform.

I sometimes object to the word virtual in ‘virtual currency’. Most of the money I possess is not in any physical form; it's merely a number stored in a database somewhere – and transactions occur without any kind of physical objects changing hands. So the word ‘virtual’ seems entirely redundant, since there's is no qualitative difference between virtual and ‘real’ money I can see. The only difference is the level of trust in the system. continue reading…