I recently rewrote my personal site using flask and peewee, breaking a good amount of stuff in the process. I was trying to track down the errors by tailing log files, but that didn't help alert me to new errors that someone visiting the site might stir up. I thought about setting up error emails a-la django, which is a tried and true method...but then I happened on a different approach. I won't say it's the most elegant solution, but it was a quick hack and the results have been awesome. I wrote a custom logging handler that pushes JSON-encoded log record data to a redis pub/sub channel. I then have an IRC bot that subscribes to this channel and when it receives a message generates a paste of the traceback and pings me with a link to the traceback.
Sometimes I want to push a file on my harddrive to S3 for safe keeping. I wrote a little script for nautilus which appears in the context menu to push files to a specific S3 bucket.
Using python and phantomjs, a headless webkit browser, it is a snap to build a self-hosted bookmarking service that can capture images of entire pages. Combine this with a simple javascript bookmarklet and you end up with a really convenient way of storing bookmarks. The purpose of this post will be to walk through the steps to getting a simple bookmarking service up and running.
http://media.charlesleifer.com/images/photos/import_playground-182916.png
At my job we've been doing a quarterly hackday for almost a year now. My coworkers have made some amazing stuff, and its nice to have an entire day dedicated to hacking on ... well, whatever you want. Tomorrow marks the 4th hackday and I need to scrounge up a good project, but in the meantime I thought I'd write a post about what I did last time around -- a lightweight python task queue that has an API similar to celery.
I've called it huey (which also turns out to be the name of my kitten).
The goal of the project was to keep it simple while not skimping on features. At the moment the project does the following:
Backend storages implement a simple API, currently the only implementation uses Redis but adding one that uses the database would be a snap.
The other main goal of the project was to have it work easily for any python application (I've been into using flask lately), but come with baked-in support for django. Because of django's centralized configuration and conventions for loading modules, the django API is simpler than the python one, but hopefully both are reasonably straightforward.
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:
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:
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.
