Search: "peewee AND sqlite"
Saturday morning hack: personalized news digest with boolean query parser
Because I had so much fun writing my last Saturday morning hack, I thought I would share another little hack. I was thinking that I really enjoy my subscription to Python weekly and wouldn't it be great if I had a personal email digest containing just the types of things that interest me? I regularly cruise reddit and hacker hater news but in my opinion there's a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio. Occasionally I stumble on fascinating content and that's what keeps me coming back.
I wanted to write an app that would search the sites I read and automatically create an email digest based on search terms that I specified. I recently swapped my blog over to SQLite and I love that the SQLite full-text search extension lets you specify boolean queries. With that in mind, I decided that I would have a curated list of boolean search queries which would be used to filter content from the various sites I read. Any articles that match my search would then be emailed to me.
Here are some of my search terms, which I am viewing in the flask-peewee admin interface:
If you're interested in learning how to build your own version of this project, check out the rest of the post.
Misadventures in Python Packaging: Optional C Extensions
I began an unlikely adventure into Python packaging this week when I made what
I thought were some innocuous modifications to the source distribution and
setup.py script for the peewee
database library. Over the course of a day, the setup.py more than doubled in
size and underwent five major revisions as I worked to fix problems arising out
of various differences in users environments. This was tracked in issue #1676,
may it always bear witness to the complexities of Python packaging!
In this post I'll explain what happened, the various things I tried, and how I ended up resolving the issue.
A Tour of Tagging Schemas: Many-to-many, Bitmaps and More
In this post I'll describe how to implement tagging with a relational database. What I mean by tagging are those little labels you see at the top of this blog post, which indicate how I've chosen to categorize the content. There are many ways to solve this problem, and I'll try to describe some of the more popular methods, as well as one unconventional approach using bitmaps. In each section I'll describe the database schema, try to list the benefits and drawbacks, and present example queries. I will use Peewee ORM for the example code, but hopefully these examples will easily translate to your tool-of-choice.
Optimistic locking in Peewee ORM
In this post I'll share a simple code snippet you can use to perform optimistic locking when updating model instances. I've intentionally avoided providing an implementation for this in peewee, because I don't believe it will be easy to find a one-size-fits-all approach to versioning and conflict resolution. I've updated the documentation to include the sample implementation provided here, however.
Peewee 4: Async, JSON, Eager-Loading and Types
If you listen real close you can hear the type whispers in there.
Peewee 4.x is a picture, in code, of me eating my hat. We got async
and are shipping a significantly better type whispering
stub based on typeshed's original. Beyond those, I've added a core JSONField
which exposes a nice cross-backend API for working with JSON data, and a new
declarative API for eager-loading relations.
Read on for the details.
How to make a Flask blog in one hour or less
For fun, I thought I'd write a post describing how to build a blog using Flask, a Python web-framework. Building a blog seems like, along with writing a Twitter-clone, a quintessential experience when learning a new web framework. I remember when I was attending a five-day Django tutorial presented by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of my favorite projects we did was creating a blog. After setting up the core of the site, I spent a ton of time adding features and little tweaks here-and-there. My hope is that this post will give you the tools to build a blog, and that you have fun customizing the site and adding cool new features.
In this post we'll cover the basics to get a functional site, but leave lots of room for personalization and improvements so you can make it your own. The actual Python source code for the blog will be a very manageable 200 lines.
Who is this post for?
This post is intended for beginner to intermediate-level Python developers, or experienced developers looking to learn a bit more about Python and Flask. For the mother of all Flask tutorials, check out Miguel Grinberg's 18 part Flask mega-tutorial.
The spec
Here are the features:
- Entries are formatted using markdown.
- Entries support syntax highlighting, optionally using Github-style triple-backticks.
- Automatic video / rich media embedding using OEmbed.
- Very nice full-text search thanks to SQLite's FTS extension.
- Pagination.
- Draft posts.
Asyncio Finally Got Peewee
I feel that it is high time that Peewee had an assyncio story. I've avoided this for years, but asyncio is not going anywhere. Peewee remains a synchronous ORM, but in order to work with the ever-widening sphere of async-first web frameworks and database drivers, it was time to come up with a plan.
Structuring flask apps, a how-to for those coming from Django
The other day a friend of mine was trying out flask-peewee and he had some questions about the best way to structure his app to avoid triggering circular imports. For someone new to flask, this can be a bit of a puzzler, especially if you're coming from django which automatically imports your modules. In this post I'll walk through how I like to structure my flask apps to avoid circular imports. In my examples I'll be showing how to use "flask-peewee", but the same technique should be applicable for other flask plugins.
I'll walk through the modules I commonly use in my apps, then show how to tie them all together and provide a single entrypoint into your app.
Building a bookmarking service with python and phantomjs
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.
Saturday morning hack: a little note-taking app with Flask
A couple Saturdays ago I spent the morning hacking together a note-taking app. I'm really pleased with the result, so I thought I'd share the code in case anyone else might find it useful.
The note-taking project idea came about out of necessity -- I wanted something that worked well from my phone. While I have a personal wiki site I've used for things like software installation notes or salsa recipes, I've also noticed that because it's so cumbersome to use from my phone, I often end up emailing things to myself. Plus a wiki implies a kind of permanence to the content, making it not a great fit for these impromptu notes. I also like to use markdown to format notes, but markdown isn't too easy on a phone because of the special characters or the need to indent blocks of text. With these considerations in mind, I set out to build a note-taking app that would be easy to use from my phone.
Here is how the app appears on a narrow screen like my phone:
And here it is on my laptop:
Because markdown is a bit difficult to use when you're not in a nice text editor like vim, I've added some simple toolbar buttons to the editor:
Read the full post for all the details!