As an IRC bot enthusiast and tinkerer, I would like to describe the most enduring and popular bot I've written, a markov-chain bot. Markov chains can be used to generate realistic text, and so are great fodder for IRC bots. The bot I am writing of has been hanging out in my town's channel for the past year or so and has amassed a pretty awesome corpus from which it generates messages. Here are few of his greatest hits:

Over the last two months I've spent a lot of time working on improvements to peewee, a lightweight ORM written in python.

Some of these features are present in Django and were added for better parity, some I found a need for while working on other projects, and others were requested by opening an issue on GitHub or bringing it up on IRC (#peewee on freenode). If you're interested in trying peewee out, it ships with an example app which is described here.

Here's a rundown on what has been added recently:

• atomic updates
• select related models
• basic transaction support

For a change, I've been doing all of my new app development using flask, a python web framework built atop the werkzeug WSGI toolkit. Having used django for the last two years it's been fun to do something different, but at the same time stick with python.

In this post I'd like to show a couple of the small projects I've written using flask over the past few weeks.

Recently I stumbled across the twitter bootstrap project, which is a set of cross-browser compliant stylesheets and scripts. I liked them so much that I've ported the admin templates to use bootstrap. Here's a little screenshot of the design refresh taken from the example app:

http://media.charlesleifer.com/images/photos/flask-peewee-admin.jpg

I hope this will make the admin easier to work with in the long-run!

I'd like to write a post about a project I've been working on for the past month or so. I've had a great time working on it and am excited to start putting it to use. The project is called flask-peewee -- it is a set of utilities that bridges the python microframework flask and the lightweight ORM peewee. It is packaged as a flask extension and comes with the following batteries included:

• Admin interface a-la django
• RESTful API toolkit a-la tastypie
• Authentication system

Over the past month I've been working on adding support for both MySQL and PostgreSQL to peewee. I'm happy to say that after a couple weekend hack sessions all tests are now passing.

With the 0.3.0 release of django-relationships, I've made a couple backwards-incompatible changes which I thought I'd mention.

One of the problems mentioned by a couple people when I asked for suggestions on improving djangosnippets.org was the proliferation of tags. This is a well-known problem on sites that allow users to enter their own tags, where misspellings are frequent and its sometimes unclear whether a tag should be plural or singular.

To try and reduce the amount of different tags on djangosnippets I ended up using the jQuery UI autocomplete tools to provide users with hints when they enter tags for their snippets.

Describing some of the improvements made to the django snippets site over the past couple weeks and asking for user feedback on additional improvements they'd like to see.

It's been a while since I first wrote about setting up Solr on Ubuntu. Since then I've opted for a different approach that is both simpler and lighter-weight. This post describes briefly the steps to setting up Solr on Ubuntu.