Svn to git

I'm getting used to git at the office. And my website was in svn. The svn is on me and my brother's server. And we're going to re-build that server in the near future. And not having to set up svn there saves quite some time.

So I moved part of the code to github and the actual content to a simple directory in our own server. Git works just fine with a repository URL like ssh://vanrees.org/~/git/websitecontent. Just init a repo in ~/git/websitecontent on the server and off you go.

Sphinx as weblog: code is now available (somewhat)

My site is static html now for two years or so. Generated with http://sphinx.pocoo.org/. No Plone (which it was when I worked with Plone) and no Django (which I'd like, as I work with it, but my current text-only setup works real fine and Sphinx is an essential Django documentation ingredient, too).

I also make my weblog with Sphinx. I need a couple of custom restructuredtext tags for that (like ..tags:: for handling tags). I basically point a script at a sphinx directory that contains my entries and it generates index.txt files for all the directories with a list of entries. And it generates tags/TAGNAME.txt files for the tags. Afterwards, I just run Sphinx and everything gets generated OK.

I got some questions in the past about my code, but never followed up by publishing my terribly Reinout-specific code. It is still Reinout-specific, but I've published it now. It might provide some ideas. The full code is at https://github.com/reinout/reinout.vanrees.org . Again: this is not something you can pip install. Best you can do is borrow and copy at the moment. (Threat the Python code in there as public domain).

Most of interest are probably https://github.com/reinout/reinout.vanrees.org/blob/master/rvo/rst.py which provides the custom restructuredtext (and thus sphinx) tags. And https://github.com/reinout/reinout.vanrees.org/blob/master/rvo/weblog.py which creates all the index and tags files.

It is not well-documented and quite specific to my case. But there are some docstrings and the code is nicely PEP8 compliant :-) If you need any info, feel free to contact me.

Twitter bootstrap css

I have to re-visit the layout of the websites we make at my work (Nelen & Schuurmans). One of the things we want is to have a more attractive layout. And after some browsing, twitter bootstrap struck me as a good basis.

And, as I do often, I first experiment on myself. So I set out to change the layout of my own website by using twitter bootstrap. I'm not even using half of bootstrap's possibilities, but I'm quite happy with the result. The basic typography is fine. There are some handy helpers for common things like labels (which I used to liven up the tags below the weblog headers on my weblog). And I quite like the simple header at the top of the page: just a simple bar.

And there's another good thing about twitter bootstrap: less. See below.

Less

What coffeescript is for javascript, less is for css. A simpler syntax that helps you write better and less duplicated css.

I like it! Take for example the headings of this entry. Hover over one and you'll see a paragraph token at the end. Sphinx adds this so you can link to individual sections in a bigger file. Sphinx also has some css that hides the paragraph token normally and only shows it when you hover over the heading:

a.headerlink {
    visibility: hidden;
}

h1:hover > a.headerlink,
h2:hover > a.headerlink,
h3:hover > a.headerlink,
h4:hover > a.headerlink,
h5:hover > a.headerlink,
h6:hover > a.headerlink,
dt:hover > a.headerlink {
    visibility: visible;
}

I restricted that to:

.headerlink {
  visibility: hidden;
  }

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, dt {
  &:hover {
    .headerlink {
      visibility: visible;
      }
    }
  }

It looks just like css, as you see in that first .headerlink rule. The second one has the special less stuff. The ampersand means an extra condition, so the &:hover effectively adds :hover to each of the h1..``dt``. This really shines if you have a couple of other extra conditions on the same set of elements.

Anyway, head over to http://lesscss.org/ where they have a better explanation.

Closing off

I'm happy with the change. One extra change that I didn't mention yet: I've removed deliverance from the mix. Deliverance is a tool that I used to change the layout of a couple of inputs (sphinx, docbook2html, latex2html) into my vanrees.org layout. It did that on the fly. But the versions kept changing and the versions I had were getting old and hard to update. And I had to run a wsgi process to run it, even though the actual website was all plain html.

I'm back to plain html now. I've implemented the layout in a Sphinx template. Simple to do, as it is just jinja2, which has the same syntax as Django. And the docbook and latex html exports are just that. I'll leave them that way. It isn't that important to have my logo on those pages :-)

One extra advantage: the site ought to be faster!

Coffeescript & Django - Roald de Vries

Coffeescript is not really a language, but it is syntactic sugar for javascript. A nicer syntax. It compiles to javascript. It uses indentation (like Python) to indicate code blocks instead of using curly braces, for instance. And the way to declare functions is easier and less verbose.

Coffeescript also allows classes, including constructors, and inheritance.

Nice: on the coffeescript site you can type in some code and get it transformed in to javascript. Handy for trying it out.

The language isn't difficult. You can learn it within the hour (he said 'a bit more than 5 minutes'). You can compile it into javascript on the server with node.js. You can also include the coffeescript.js script in your page and let the browser handle the compiling automatically (at a performance penalty, but it is easier for development).

Django-coffeescript integrates the compiling into Django. And you can even put inline coffeescript in your template. But normally you'll just point at external files.

Bonus tip: django-less. Less is css + variables + nesting + inheritance. Integrated in the same way as django-coffeescript.

One drawback of coffeescript: it makes debugging harder as you have to debug the javascript that comes out of the compiler instead of the coffeescript code you just wrote.

Django-fluent-dashboard - Diederik van der Boor

"Django-fluent-dashboard - a fresh dashboard for your admin interface" was the title.

Django is a bit technical. His thought: how to make the Django admin more usable as a CMS that's friendly? Another core thing in his thinkwork was the idea of reusable apps.

If you look at the current admin, you directly see the huge number of apps. Not nice.

Somebody made Django admin tools. Nice. A good solution. It gives the admin a nicer layout and even a menu bar that helps you find things.

The core idea: django-fluent-dashboard only modifies the first page of the admin: instead of the big list of apps you get friendly, grouped, icons.

He made a modification (or plugin, or newer version, I don't know) that looks even nicer. More dashboard-based. See the example on the documentation site.

In the end, he hopes to turn it into a full CMS. There's already a django-fluent-contents and django-fluent-pages on github. But they're separate projects. django-fluent-dashboard works just fine with Django Fiber, for instance.

Who hates stdlib's logging? - Remco Wendt

A small teaser for a bigger talk at next month's Dutch python meeting.

Logbook is nicer logging for python than the standard library's default logging module.

And for Django: whatever logging module you use, use django-sentry to get a website that collects your various site's logs. He made a version that works especially nice with logbook, as logbooks gives you all logs of a web request if something goes wrong: it doesn't only give you just the last traceback. So use debug logging liberally, it will help you debug.

30loops.net Django hosting - Christo Buschek

http://30loops.net/ is a Python and Django hosting platform, located in Amsterdam (and a bit in Berlin since he moved recently).

They have years of experience in sysadmin and hosting, so they're building yet another django/python/wsgi hosting platform. What you normally get at such a "platform as a service:

• Pay only for what you use.
• Scale horizontally as needed.
• You can concentrate on developpment, we care about the rest

They differ on two major points:

• REST interface with json. You can build your own custom tools if needed.
• One app can have multiple environments, like development/staging/production. You can clone environments. Handy for testing and running performance tests - all without interfering with production.

They actually abstracted away quite a lot, so you can run your apps on 30loops' own hardware, but also on other cloud providers. Handy if you have to deploy to multiple physical locations.

You can access all logs and metrics with REST: you own all your data.

They're also on github: https://github.com/30loops

You can sign up for private beta now, btw.

What does is take to be a professional developer? - Nicolaas Heyning

Asking around gave the usual list of "good tools", "passion" and "emacs". He mentioned:

• Clients. Online like freelance.nl, linkedin, network meetings, by reference. From the audience: organize stuff; run a blog.
• Administration. Taxes, budgetting, investments, staff. From the audience: outsourcing (but be very, very careful); having a partner in the company that wants to do this.
• Professional work. Provide documentation. Add tests. Internationalization. Data migrations. Etcetera.

Why all these questions? Reason: there is a big need for professional software developers. You see lots of mails on the mailinglist asking for personell.

Would it be a good idea to start a "django academy"? Certification? Learning about acquiring clients? Create a network for supply and demand of professional developers?

There was quite some discussion afterwards (and I didn't agree with some of the points, for the record).

Django Fiber - 11.000 downloads later - Dennis Bunskoek

Django fiber is a simple, user friendly CMS for your Django projects. It is getting bigger and bigger. 11k downloads since April 7, 2011. That's about 1250 downloads per month. That's only counted on pypi, though. Django CMS has 60k downloads since the beginning of time, as a comparison. So it is turning out to be pretty big!

What did we do since early 2011?

• Performance and admin improvements.
• Translations. (Via transifex, they got quite some contributed translations!)
• Lots of spit&polish. Better WYSIWIG editor.

And... they build a lot of sites and apps with it (he said to me they build some 60 sites!)

Near-future plans:

• Better integration of your models.
• UI and performance improvements. They are having a sprint session tomorrow with some designers that are also users of a Fiber website. Nice.
• Better page creation (widgets, lists and views of your model instances).
• Versioning of pages and content.
• More tests and even better documentation. Sass/coffeescript.

They are realizing that they need to build a community around it if they want to get it off the ground further:

• Create a real django fiber website.
• Better documentation: read the docs website. And videos.
• More examples in the Django fiber example.
• Get more use out of github. More interaction via issues and pull requests.

Nice: a couple of days ago, Luke Plant mentioned some big db optimizations for Django. They will look at that tomorrow, too.

(I wrote about an earlier 30 minute talk he gave on Django Fiber for if you want more information.)