Gmail is a frequently used SMTP host for Django apps. Its free and relatively simple to setup which is ideal for small apps. There are a few significant downfalls. First, its limited to 500 emails a day with no option to upgrade. Second, it limits and even re-writes all outgoing emails to the username of [...]
Author Archive
5 Jan
The PickledObjectField for Object Storage in Django
I’ve become a really big fan of the PickledObjectField provided by this django snippet. So much so that I use it in almost every django model I create these days. Basically it serves as the best way to do an object store in your database and perfectly translates in any JSON conversion. Its an essential [...]
1 Dec
On Productivity, Organization and Tools
I’ve been a fanatic about finding the best ways to organize my life and stay “on top of things”. There are a million articles online on how to go about this. I’ve read my fare share of these and tried a lot of the methods out. Usually something ends up working decent for a while [...]
27 Jan
Dynamically Calling Fancybox from Javascript
Fancybox is a really nice jQuery library for creating lightboxes. There are a few simple examples and some documentation on their site but there seems to be no demonstrated method for loading a fancybox dynamically with javascript. All of their examples require you to embed a link to the lightbox content somewhere in the page [...]
11 Jan
When Can I Stop Saving for Retirement?
I learned some interesting things about financing retirement yesterday. I’ve been reading a financial book a friend recommended to me preaching the common methods on “how to get rich the safe way” through managing your 401(k) and IRA’s and such. It’s somewhat helpful in recommending what banks to use and laying out all of the [...]
7 Jan
Comparing Github and BitBucket
There are a lot of advantages to using a distributed revision control system as opposed to centralized. There are also some down sides, mostly in that it can be a bit more confusing to manage. A centralized web interface however seems to solve that problem quite nicely. Currently there are two major competitors in that [...]
30 Sep
Initialize Django Tests
I use a lot of doctests for apps that all need to work on a set of initialized data. I was hoping that there would be some kind of hook in Django for this but there is not. I could switch all of the doctests to unittests and use fixtures but that would be a [...]
26 Aug
Forwarding Naked Domains for Appengine with Apache
Google Appengine currently does not allow configuration of naked domains. Meaning, if you’re building something on Appengine you’ll have to settle for a URL like http://www.mysite.com or http://whatever.mysite.com and you will not be able to use http://mysite.com. Its not so bad in most cases, but not having http://mysite.com isn’t going to stop people from trying [...]
11 Aug
Socialbrowse in the StarTribune
Yesterday I was on the cover of the Business section of the StarTribune. Its a nice article that talks a bit about Socialbrowse and my path to what I’m doing right now. It also talks about Luke Francl and his awesome startup FanChatter which is also from Minnesota and also in YCombinator. Here is a [...]
10 Aug
Log Observer using Python’s subprocess
Today I needed to write a wrapper around a program that would examine the stdio and respond immediately to certain results. The task was handled nicely with a python script using subprocess. There isn’t a lot of documentation examples on it so to figure it out I wrote this small test app and I thought [...]
