Python Posts

Django Tech Blog is now running my blog. It is only fitting that my first post on the new system is about the technology behind it.

I never intended to compete with Wordpress on number of features, and Techblog was never intended to be an all-things-to-everyone type of web application, but I can boast a few features that set it apart. I'll cover some of those features in future posts, for now I would like to go over the light-weight markup language I use for posts. continue reading…

The new Django blog system I have been working on is virtually finished, I'm just testing it at the moment. Now I know that by writing my own blog system I will miss out on all the capabilities of a full featured and mature system, such as Wordpress; but my new system -- which I call Django Techblog -- has a few features that Wordpress doesn't, but more importantly, it works just the way I want it to.

One of those new features is the ability to insert syntax highlighted code in to comments, which is very useful for a techy blog! I've created a post on the beta site, and I'd like to invite you to pop over and test the commenting system. I'll delete the comments when I'm satisfied it is working nicely and I can replace www.willmcgugan.com. So feel free to play about with it...

Django has pretty good support for caching, which is one of the easiest ways of speeding up a web application. The default is to cache for ten minutes, which means that if you get multiple requests for a page within a ten minute window then Django can serve up a stored copy of the page without hitting the database or rendering the HTML. The caching period can be set per-page and fragments of pages can be cached rather than the whole, but the system rests on the fact that it doesn't matter if the content doesn't change for a period of time. continue reading…

Since Net Communities have their new developer, I can post the coder test I wrote to find a replacement. The test was not meant to be particularly challenging, and we only requested that developers do one out of the three problems. Most developers did all three--presumably in an effort to impress--but nobody got all three correct, first time around. That was probably my fault, because the third problem had a subtle issue that is easy to overlook.

I'll quote the problems here, including typos. Occasionally the way I phrased things was slightly ambiguous, but I didn't penalize if the candidate misunderstood a requirement due to my use of language.

Example input:

microsoft

apple

microsoft.

Apple?

security

microsoft

internet

Example output:

microsoft 3

apple 2 continue reading…

My current employer, Net Communities, is looking for a Python / Django developer to replace me -- I'm moving to Oxford to work on a very interesting Django site. I can honestly say that Net Communities has been a fun place to work, and if it wasn't for the fact that I'd prefer to live in a smaller place than London, I would still be there. Net Communities is based in Farringdon, London. See the job ad for more details.

To filter out the developers who are bluffing, I have devised a series of programming tests, each more fiendish and difficult than the next. Actually, they aren't difficult at all. The tests are just some of the typical tasks that you might need to do for a Django site. You will be sent a link to the test if you apply.

I've release a new version of Postmarkup, my bbcode rendering engine for Python. If you are not familiar with bbcode, it is a simple markup used by many message boards. For example [b]Hello, World![/b] would render Hello, World!

There are a number of bugfixes in the 1.1.4 release, mostly to fix the possibility of HTML injection by manipulation of the tags and attributes. The link tag was particularly problematic for this, so it has been re-written. I've also made a number of optimizations so that it will render HTML faster. It wasn't exactly slow, but I have noticed that most people use Postmarkup as a filter in web frameworks (rather than storing the pre-rendered HTML in a database), so the speed boost may be appreciated. continue reading…

I'll be going to the Future of Web Apps Expo in London, this Thursday and Friday (9th and 10th of October).There will be a lot of big names there, like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter; and some smaller web companies, like Net Communities, where I work.

If there are any Pythonistas going, feel free to stop by the Net Communities stand and say hi (look for the ItProPortal logo). We're giving away a free 32 inch television to one lucky Expo goer!

After my last post regarding FS, my file-system abstraction layer for Python, I think I may have left people thinking,"that's nice, but what would you use if for?". Generally, I see it as a way of simplifying file access and exposing only the files you need for your application -- regardless of their physical source. But I can think of a few other uses that may be a littler cooler. continue reading…

This is something I have been hacking together for a while now; FS is a file-system abstraction for Python. It has reached a stable state and is worthy of an official (0.1.0) release. continue reading…