http://scottbarnham.com/blog Code and comments on web development, Django, Python and things (un)related. Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:23:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For a while I've been using the CustomImageField as a way to specify an upload path for images. It's a hack that lets you use ids or slugs from your models in the upload path, e.g.: /path/to/media/photos/1234/flowers.jpg or /path/to/media/photos/scotland-trip/castle.jpg CustomImageField no more Since the FileStorageRefactor was merged in to trunk r8244, it's no longer ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/08/25/dynamic-upload-paths-in-django/ Extra fields for Users Most of the Django projects I've worked on need to store information about each user in addition to the standard name and email address held by the contrib.auth.models.User model. The old way: User Profiles The solution in the past was to create a "user profile" model which is associated ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/08/21/extending-the-django-user-model-with-inheritance/ About a week ago Andrew and I launched a new Django-powered site called Hey! Wall. It's a social site along the lines of "the wall" on social networks and gives groups of friends a place to leave messages, share photos, videos and links. We wanted to gauge performance and try ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/04/28/django-performance-testing-a-real-world-example/ Serving from a working copy A simple way to update sites is to serve them from Subversion working copies. Checkout the code on the server, develop and commit changes, then svn update the server when you're ready to release. Security concerns There's a potential security problem with this. Subversion keeps track ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/04/22/serving-websites-from-svn-checkout-considered-harmful/ A while back I wrote about using edit inline with image and file fields. Specifically, I suggested adding an uneditable BooleanField as the core field of the related model. This means you don't have to set the ImageField or FileField to be core (which would cause confusing behaviour). Removing ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/02/24/imagefield-and-edit_inline-revisited/ Getting selected text in a Firefox extension I'm developing a Firefox extension for a client which does something with the currently selected text in the browser window. The standard way to get the selection is with window.content.getSelection(). Selection is empty in Gmail Some users reported that selected text in Gmail messages wasn't ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/02/21/getselection-returns-empty-in-google-mail/ Choosing the best web host Sometimes friends and clients ask me to recommend a web hosting company. For the past couple of years I've done my own hosting on a VPS, so I don't spend much time with shared web hosting accounts. But there are a few I've used ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/01/30/which-web-hosting-company-is-best/ Logging to syslog in Python I was trying to use the standard Python logging module to write messages to syslog. The logging module has a SysLogHandler class which can log to a local or remote syslog daemon. With no host specified, SysLogHandler uses localhost which is what I wanted. I ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/01/01/sysloghandler-not-writing-to-syslog-with-python-logging/ When the Django Gigs site first went live we noticed the ordering of developers by name was not right. Those starting with an uppercase letter were coming before those starting with a lowercase letter. PostgreSQL and the locale PostgreSQL has a locale setting which is configured when the cluster is created. ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2007/11/20/case-insensitive-ordering-with-django-and-postgresql/ An informal survey of the Django community This week, Andrew and I launched the Django Gigs website to help employers find Django developers. Andrew wrote about it and thanks to the Django Community feed aggregator we had quite a few visitors in the first couple of days. It's clear that Django ... http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2007/09/29/django-developers-we-are-the-world/