Tag: django

Three years ago I wrote a guide to building a VPS web server for serving sites in a PHP environment. That setup served me well for some time, but most of the sites I run now — including this one — are now written in Python. Earlier this year I built another web server to reflect this. It’s similar to before; I still use Ubuntu and I still like to serve pages with nginx. But PHP has been replaced with Python, and many of the packages used to build the environment have changed as a result. As with the last time, I decided to compile my notes into a guide, both for my own reference and in case anyone else would like to duplicate it. So far, the server has proven to be fast and efficient. It serves Python using uWSGI, uses a PostgreSQL database, and includes a simple mail server provided by Postfix. I think it’s a good setup for serving simple Django-based websites.

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You may not notice much, but this blog has been completely rewritten.

I started developing in Django last winter and quickly became smitten with both the Django framework and the Python. Most of the coding I’ve done this year has been in Python. Naturally, I had thoughts of moving this website from Wordpress over to a Django-based blog.

For a while I did nothing about it. Then I had another project come up that required some basic blog functionality be added to a Django-based site. A blog is — or, at least, can be — a fairly simple affair, but before writing my own I decided to look around and see what else was out there. There’s a number of Django-based blogs floating around (Kevin Fricovsky has a list), but few of them jumped out at me. Most were not actively developed and depended on too many stale packages for my taste, or they just had a feature set that I didn’t like.

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Wishlist is a Django application for creating wishlists.

I used Amazon Wishlist for a number of years, but my paranoia finally caught up to me and I decided that I didn’t need to give Amazon that much more information about my interests.

I tried a few substitutes and found that my requirements for a wishlist were less than common. I don’t often use wishlists in the usual way of asking people for gifts on special occasions. Instead, I use wishlists privately to keep track of items that I wish to purchase myself. It helps me to determine savings goals, to track books that I want to read, etc. As such, I usually do not want items on my wishlist to be publicly viewable.

Out of the substitutes I tried, Wishlistr was undoubtedly the best, but there were some aspects of it that I didn’t like. After using it for a while, I decided to write my own app.

As with Gear Tracker, Wishlist is open source. You can get the code on GitHub.

Gear Tracker is an open-source inventory system for wilderness travel gear.

When I first bought my scale, I started a spreadsheet containing the weights of various pieces of gear. It seemed like a good idea — I knew I wanted some sort of database to store my measured weights and other notes in — but I never got around to updating it. Data in a spreadsheet is too static. You can’t do much with it. I think that characteristic contributed to my disinterest with the spreadsheet.

So for a while now I’ve had the idea of writing a web application to track my gear. Over the past week, I finally got around to doing it.

Gear Tracker is built on Django, a web application framework. (If you’re not familiar with Django, and you have anything to do with making websites, it’s probably worth your time to learn a thing or two.)

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