tlog (Posts about python)

7 years of Django in 7-ish days

Thibauld Nion — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 20:24:11 GMT

Spring was quite an "interesting time" for my personal project: WaterOnMars.

Indeed I started to work on adding a new feature (a first in a while but maybe the topic of another post) but each time I was pushing or deploying code I was suddenly getting back warnings unrelated to my changes but pointing at core components like, err... Python or Django versions being deprecated.

So kudos for Python and github developers for making a clever use of warnings and, yes, I admit that using Python2.7 (ending its life in 2020) and Django1.4 (published 7 years ago) in 2019 is lame.

So... migrations !

Why leave Wordpress behind for Nikola ?

Thibauld Nion — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 19:59:41 GMT

In my previous post I announced my website's migration from Wordpress to Nikola.

Still, with Wordpress having been my site's engine for so many years, I feel that I owe a few explanations to the community.

In this post I'll enumerate what stands out in my (very good !) experience with Wordpress, plus a few words about zenPhoto and what makes the difference between those two and Nikola.

Migrations: from Wordpress to a static site with Nikola

Thibauld Nion — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 15:30:17 GMT

This is it ! My first post writen with Nikola and, even better, all my website is now made only of static pages.

After serving me well during the past 12 years, Wordpress (thanks to Automattic and its community) will not power anymore my blog, which I expect to consule less resource and to require only marginally less maintenance.

The new software I'm using to replace it is called Nikola (a big thank you to Roberto Alsina, Chris Warrick and other contributors) and it generates my whole website as static HTML pages.

The flexibility of Nikola allowed me to keep most of the organisation of this site untouched with remarkably few change of addresses for the content but still with a little bit of extra efforts that I'll describe below.

For the most important, though, you can find the blog posts and the photos albums at the same places as they were before.

Long overdue release of Yapsy

Thibauld Nion — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 22:27:46 GMT

TL;DR: Yapsy v1.12 has been released with fixes for Python3.6 and multiprocessing on windows. So, after 3 years ~~sleeping~~ busy with a fair bit of work and family ~~duties~~ joyful activities, I eventually got some time to actually release Yapsy – the fat-free DIY python plugin management toolkit. There was a fair bit of contributions (compared to the modest size of the project), that I'm sorry not to have released earlier but which bring some nice polishing to yapsy. The most prominent news I think is a better compatibility with modern Python (esp. 3.6) and the resolution of a nasty bug that made the instantiation of plugins in their own (sub)processes (with the Multiprocessing Plugin Manager) impossible on Windows (changelog below).

Wateronmars feature complete, soon ? What has been added can be edited !

Thibauld Nion — Sun, 10 May 2015 20:20:19 GMT

Wateronmars -- my news reader and bookmark saving web app -- has recently got some new features: every items (feed sources and bookmarks) can now be easily edited and removed. Not too soon, right ? I've actually been using it since a little more than 1 year to consume my feeds and store some links and the need to edit a bookmark title or to un-subscribe from some feed wasn't a big urge, but eventually became big enough to motivate to add the missing forms and bit of REST API. This was also the occasion to clean a little more some of the pages, which, in turn, is a just a prelude of the next big feature to come: internationalization (more on that later). The result has a certain feeling of completeness and can be seen on the demo site on heroku and in the sources on github.

New releases and features for Yapsy

Thibauld Nion — Sat, 09 May 2015 14:57:27 GMT

Yapsy - my fat-free DIY python plugin management toolkit -- has recently jumped from 1.10 to 1.11 with a great new contribution: allowing plugins to run in their own processes separated from the plugin manager's (and presumably the application's) own process. Adding brand new features is not very frequent for Yapsy (last time was 2 years and a half ago !) but it doesn't prevent people from using it and contributing to it, which I find really nice. Besides the features there has been also a fair number of bug fixes contributed which, I guess, can be interpreted as a good sign (even though I'd prefer to have it bug-free). All of this was the occasion to improve a little more the documentation (also on readthedoc) to be more helpful and make sure that people know how and where to contribute (spoiler: github pull requests are perfectly fine if you've lost your sourceforge credentials and don't intend to get them back ;) ) You can read more on the latest release notes:

Minor release for Yapsy 1.10.423

Thibauld Nion — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 22:20:23 GMT

I've just released a minor version of Yapsy, a small python library for plugin management. Not a big deal actually, just a few adjustments to take into account the feedback from developers of the Nikola project where yapsy is used as a support for the application's modular structure. I also took from them the idea of registering yapsy to coveralls.io which motivated me to add some unit-test just to get the green badge reserved for a test coverage higher than 90%.

Bookmarklets: no-brainer integration of WaterOnMars on Android

Thibauld Nion — Mon, 05 May 2014 22:10:43 GMT

WaterOnMars provides bookmarklets to do basic actions like subscribing to an RSS feed or to bookmark a web page. Bookmarklets are very handy and they work pretty well with desktop browsers, but mobile browsers hardly support them. Unfortunately, since a few months I've been browsing the net and reading news on WaterOnMars almost exclusively from my (Android) tablet. A common solution to get similar functionality as bookmarklets on mobile platform is to develop Android-specific applications. However I did find an alternative solution, which may not be 100% user friendly, but remains quite handy: the Bookmarklet Free app !

WaterOnMars now runs on Bootstrap3

Thibauld Nion — Sun, 04 May 2014 12:48:36 GMT

When I started developing WaterOnMars, the fashionable toolkit for web GUI work was the version 2 of Twitter Bootstrap. Of course, by the time my project reached a truly usable state, the version 3 of bootstrap was released and the version 2 stopped being maintained. Another example of the perpetual obsolescence developers have had to face since the dawn of time (e.g the 70's). Version 3's major feature being its first class support for mobile platform and my main usage of WaterOnMars being via a tablet, migrating was really tempting but I had no idea how much work I'd have to put into it. I did it a few weeks a go though and the good news was that it's been much much easier that I thought.

fabric: a good assistant for the development of WaterOnMars

Thibauld Nion — Thu, 01 May 2014 22:05:34 GMT

Despite spending currently more time using my WaterOnMars feed reader than developing it, I'm still making small improvements to it. And to make my life easier I could count on a solid little project: fabric ! fabric is a Python based command-line utility designed to help running commands remotely: typically to deploy a web app on a remote server. So I'm using it to deploy WaterOnMars on my personal server and also to deploy the demo version on heroku. But more recently I added fabric's configuration file (the "fabfile") to the sources of the project as an officially maintained helper for development tasks ((well I didn't think of it in such a formal way obviously)). It's now usable to run the test suite, to launch the web app locally, to set-up the db and to deploy it on custom servers.