Moya Posts

19 posts tagged with moya

A quick way to get Moya Techblog up and running (or just to test it) is to deploy it with Heroku.

If you click the following button, it will deploy Techblog on a public server:

When that's done you should have a working version of this site (sans my content obviously). It's remarkably easy to customize if you aren't happy with my coder design skills.

There is one caveat you should be aware of; Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem, which basically means that your uploaded files will disappear after a while. That is bit of a deal-breaker for a site designed for photography, but there is a solution. You can host your uploads with Amazon S3.

To use Amazon S3 with Techblog, set the following environment variables (you will have a chance to edit these when you deploy): continue reading…

I've had a blog on my vanity domain for nearly a decade now. For the last 6 years, it has been powered by Django Techblog, which I wrote out of my frustration with syntax highlighting plugins in Wordpress. Techblog has happily served my blog those 6 years, with only minor hiccups when I half-heartedly ported the code to the latest Django.

There was nothing terribly wrong with Django Techblog; it had multiple blogs, tags, search etc., but there were some annoyances that I didn't have the motivation to do much about. The custom markup system I used was clever, but I would often forget the syntax! The support for images was rudimentary and the single-threaded comment system wouldn't notify me of replies. continue reading…

This screencast demonstrates how to build a database driven, Markdown powered wiki from scratch in around 25 lines of code. Lines of code is of course a poor metric, but I think the end result of part 1 (more planned) packs quite a lot of functionality for what is very simple and readable code. I'll be building on this code in future screencasts, to create something which is more feature complete.

I found creating this to be a challenge; thinking, typing and talking is about 50% more things than I can do at once! Hopefully I'll master it as I go.

For more information on Moya, please see www.moyaproject.com.

Today I released v0.5.14 of Moya, my no-Python Python web framework.

The no-Python probably needs some explaining… Moya is written in Python, and can be extended in Python, but runs web applications written in an interpreted language called Moya code (name is uninspired, I know).

This release was primarily driven by development of Bean Counter, a web app that manages virtual currency. Essentially it's online banking for internet based ‘money’, intended for use as a community currency.

In tandem with this release I've also added a couple of re-usable libraries which, I think, add a significant amount of value to Moya. The first is Moya Logins which creates OAuth Sign In buttons, i.e. Sign In with Google etc. The second is Moya Auto, which adds AJAX powered auto-completion to form inputs. continue reading…

I have a webserver with 3 WSGI applications running on different domains (1, 2, 3). All deployed with a combination of Gunicorn and NGINX. A combination that works really well, but there are two annoyances that are only going to get worse the more sites I deploy:

A) The configuration for each server resides in a different location on the filesystem, so I have to recall & type a long path to edit settings. continue reading…

Google Analytics and kin are great for getting stats on your visitors, but often I simply want to know: who is linking to my site? You can deduce this from web server logs, but server logs tend to be too noisy and a make it hard to pick out the referer URLs.

Moya doesn't have a stats library yet, but it's not hard to MacGuyver up a solution to log incoming links. We need to run some code on every request so that we can detect the referer and write a log message. The simplest way to do that is to create a <url> tag with a wildcard route of “/*”. We can add this <url> to the mountpoint of the site library (the site library is where we customize various aspects of the site). Here's the code:

Yes, referer is a misspelling, but it has been codified in to the http spec! continue reading…

I recently implemented a Sublime Text like fuzzy matching for my encrypted notes app. Fuzzy matching is a really nice feature that I haven't seen used outside of code editors.

If you haven't used Sublime Text, the fuzzy matching is used to quickly open files. Rather than navigate directories in the UI – which can laborious – the open file dialogue uses the characters you type to filter a list of paths. Each character you type must match a character in the file path exactly once and and in the same order as they appear in the path. For instance the search “abgvi” would match “/application/blog/views”, as would “blgview”. The basic idea should work with any text, not just paths. continue reading…

The last two weekends I scratched a web development itch. I've been using KeepNote to store notes for years now. It's a nice simple desktop app, which I use to store details such as past addresses, account numbers, phone numbers etc. And more sensitive information like PIN numbers and passwords.

I configured KeepNote to store notes in Dropbox so that I don't risk losing anything. This has worked quite well, but I've always been frustrated that (a) I can't access my notes on my mobiles devices, and (b) I'm relying on a third party to keep my secrets. continue reading…

I never intended to write a template system for Moya. Originally, I was going to offer a plugin system to use any template format you wish, with Jinja as the default. Jinja was certainly up to the task; it is blindingly fast, with a comfortable Django-like syntax. But it was never going to work exactly how I wanted it to, and since I don't have to be pragmatic on my hobby projects, I decided to re-invent the wheel. Because otherwise, how do we get better wheels? continue reading…