Working around Django's ORM to do interesting things with GFKs May 03, 2012 00:05 / 0 comments

In this post I want to discuss how to work around some of the shortcomings of djangos ORM when dealing with Generic Foreign Keys (GFKs).

At the end of the post I'll show how to work around django's lack of correctly CAST-ing when the generic foreign key is of a different column type than the objects it may point to.


Micawber, a python library for extracting rich content from URLs April 19, 2012 11:13 / 0 comments

A while ago I wrote about an awesome API for retrieving metadata about URLs called oembed. I'm writing to announce a new project I've been working on called micawber, which is very similar but with a cleaner API and not restricted to django projects.


So long, djangosnippets, and thanks for all the fish March 06, 2012 09:38 / 0 comments

After two years of maintaining djangosnippets.org, I am pleased to announce that the guys from django-de are going to be taking over and you can expect to see some real improvements.


Integrating the flask microframework with the peewee ORM September 27, 2011 10:52 / 5 comments

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:


Quick update on django-relationships July 07, 2011 11:29 / 0 comments

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


Suggesting tags with django-taggit and jQuery UI June 29, 2011 12:20 / 2 comments

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.


Django snippets site improvements, what would you like to see? June 27, 2011 13:04 / 12 comments

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.


Munin-like dashboard for Django websites June 04, 2011 01:37 / 0 comments


Updates to the django-utils task queue June 01, 2011 11:40 / 0 comments

After several months of running the task queue bundled with django-utils, I decided to re-evaluate certain aspects of the design. This post describes those changes.


A small update on django-completion May 01, 2011 01:10 / 1 comments

Just a quick heads-up to anyone out there using django-completion, I've released a couple important updates this weekend and you may be interested in updating your checkouts. These changes are purely additive, so don't worry about having to update your own code.

There are three important updates:

  1. Bug: the (experimental) Redis backend could fail to return results under certain conditions and, if data were removed frequently, leak memory all over the place
  2. Bug: partial titles generated for the Redis and Database backends were too restrictive, i.e. "testing python code" would not complete on "python" unless the AUTOCOMPLETE_MAX_WORDS setting was 2 (or 1)
  3. Feature: it is now possible to restrict suggestions to certain models by passing in a list of acceptable models to the suggest() method