tanis.us

I decided I liked the idea of writing a program to parse my squid access.log so that I could categorize the web requests that were passing through my proxy using shallalist (http://www.shallalist.de/). If I succeeded and cross-referenced the information with time and IP, I could start doing all kinds of cool little analytics to get a handle on the day to day traffic that I'm seeing.

I figured I'd start with a "proof of concept" which you'll find below. I attempted to write for speed, rather than memory usage. This code took just ...

is here!

n = 10
if n > 0:
  print ("Hello World!") 

EDIT: All fixed, as you can see, now just need to come up with a more color compatible style ..

Made the site a little prettier, go me. Haven't updated the site in a while. Thinking of adding some integration with social media websites, might be interesting.

Made live some much needed changes to RSS; templates and category specific feeds will come next.

As you can see, I have a weak little archive implementation up as of now. I was unfortunately led on a bit of a goose chase.

You see, my original inclination was to simply implement the archive programmatically (for lack of a better term) in the view for my root page. After a few lines of code I figured, Django has got to have a neat little automagic way to do this; just like with comments. After consulting a few different sources it seemed that generic views were the recommended solution. After creating generics for the year/month/day archives ...

I've tweaked the templates a bit as I've explored the documentation. Namely, I'm now using markdown for formatting and I'm truncating all posts over 100 words. Sure, currently I only have two posts that long, but perhaps in the future I'll have the time and inclination to be more verbose. There's a few other bells and whistles hardly worth mentioning.

With summer in full swing I should be able to pick up the pace a bit.

I played around a little bit with Django's built in comments module today. In true Django fashion, it proved quite quick and easy. There is still a little more work that needs to be done, custom templates mainly, before I bring it live.

EDIT: Went ahead and posted the comment additions since I got moderation working satisfactorily enough. There are enough generic templates in place that the process works. Preview as well as the comment confirmation aren't exactly pretty though.

I believe I have the last few kinks worked out. Although I've already had experience with mod_wsgi, I always like to have documentation to refer back to. Considering the overall quality of Django documentation as a whole I've had little to complain about, but I find the relatively poor state of wsgi/django documentation a little odd.

The documentation at http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/django_apache_and_mod_wsgi as an example is unnecessarily complex, seems to contain a lot of redundant and inexplicable configuration, and doesn't even touch on certain optimizations that seem necessary even on a low traffic ...

Went ahead and went through the trouble of running tanis.us on the apache/wsgi application stack. If you happened to stop by during the switch, sorry for the downtime.

I put tTwistedMud, my implementation of a MUD written in Python, on BitBucket. Since I've last posted about it, I've done some work on the underlying object model and basic game mechanics. Most notably I've begun working on player professions as well as computer-controlled NPCs. Still a lot of work to be done. I haven't yet updated the public code base with the changes to professions, but I will do so soon.

The project, as it is, can be found at: tTwistedMud

Added the about page, doesn't look particularly good or have anything interesting on it.. but it's there.

Alright RSS feeds have been added, basically. Need to find an appropriate place to put the link, http://tanis.us/blog/feeds/rss/, as well as strip the HTML from the post body. Irritatingly, Safari doesn't seem to properly show the feed, but I believe this to be a known problem between Safari and Django. Firefox and everything else I've checked seems to work perfectly fine.

After a short hiatus I finally had some more time to put in on the web site. Navigation by category has been added, so now you can view posts limited by category such as you would find on most other common blogs. RSS feeds and archiving should probably be next.

The site now recognizes html formatting, most likely I'll end up using Beautiful Soup, or something similar to do some html sanity checks.

So I finally sat down and decided to write my own web app. I've been needing to broaden my horizons in the web arena for a while, so rather then keep up the old wordpress page that I never updated I figured I'd put this up as a work in progress.

I've written it using Django and Python, and as of this date it's currently running on top of Django's built-in test server. I plan on switching over to Apache/WSGI as soon as the code seems stable, but right now the test server is ...