Blog Post Archive

My day job is as a CRM consultant for Professional Advantage. I help companies implement the Microsoft CRM platform so that they can streamline their business processes such as sales pipeline management, helpdesk / service management, and marketing automation. I've just written a blog post over on the PA blog about using Mobile devices to help your sales team get the most out of your CRM system.

I'm not one to blog about personal topics, but I have to make an exception as 2011 has been a heck of a year on a number of fronts. I became a dad, dove in head-first at work, ignored my open source commitments, finished university, travelled to Nepal, and overall had a hell of a year.

Many moons ago on this blog I wrote about a simple menuing system for Django. For the sake of convenience, I've just packaged up that code (plus a few minor improvements) into a package named django-menu which is also available via PyPi with pip install django-menu. Basic documentation is included in the package and in the git repository.

A while ago I released a helpdesk tool that I use to manage support requests, under the name of Jutda Helpdesk (named after my small consulting company). The project has received a slow but steady stream of patches and bug fixes, however it's always been a little tricky to manage with a single committer over at Google Code. To make life easier for everybody involved, I've renamed the project to django-helpdesk and shifted the source code and issue management to GitHub.

A long time ago I started collecting statistics from people submitting their sites to DjangoSites. I promised to collate the results one day - and here they are.

When a user signs up on your website with an invalid email address, how do you let them know? In most cases, the bounces go into the inbox of an admin who ignores them, or even worse they don't go into any monitored inbox. Recently I've started using a 3rd party for my email delivery, which has made dealing with bounced emails much easier both for me and my customers. Read on to see how I integrated Postmark's bounce API with Django, and implemented a user-friendly alert on DjangoSites.org when signup emails bounce.

I often get asked to update website screenshots over at DjangoSites because somebody has re-designed their website, or the screenshot showed a cross-browser bug in their code. I'm now pleased to announce that screenshots can be renewed on-demand by website owners! Read on for more information.

It's been a while, but the Django Site of the Week is back. This week I spoke to Tom Tobin, developer at satire news site The Onion, about their Django-powered site The A.V. Club. Originally a Drupal website, Tom and his team converted the site to Django over a period odds three months. So how do they handle a million unique views a month? Read the article to find out.

What's the most popular method of deploying Django powered websites? Recently, the officially sanctioned method was selected to be mod_wsgi with Apache. However, there are Django powered websites out there that are using a plethora of other methods to put websites in front of viewers.

A change for DjangoSites has just been made public that will allow website submitters to volunteer their deployment details, so that over time detailed statistics can be gathered. If your website is listed at DjangoSites, you can click the 'Edit' link right away to let us know what you're using. If you aren't yet listed, the submission form also lets you provide those details.

The results will not be shown alongside your DjangoSites listing. Instead, once there are more than a handful of responses I will publish aggregated figures for public consumption. Read on for a little more information!

Seeing how other people work is something that seems to be of interest to most developers. Whether it's because they want to become better workers themselves or because they're somewhat voyeuristic is open to debate - either way, Django-powered website Deskography is a well-designed social desk-sharing website. This week, I spoke to Gustaf Sjöberg of Distrop to find out why they chose Django to power Deskography, and what it's allowed them to do. You can read the interview over at the Django Site of the Week.

Recently, I have wanted to improve the searching ability in a number of my Django projects. I've often added a search box that simply does an icontains filter, which works fine for small sites but doesn't scale due to the inefficiency of matching text with basic SQL queries. The plus side of an icontains filter is that it works on all of Django's database backends (with the exception of SQLite, which works but in a case-sensitive way), so it can be useful for pluggable applications to implement. I wanted something that could do some heavier lifting, so I looked into tsearch2 - a PostgreSQL plugin that provides full-text indexing and searching that's twice as fast as standard icontains filters. On DjangoSites I managed to reduce my search queries to half their original time, with improved accuracy. Read the full article to find out how.

Eric Floehr is the man behind ForecastWatch and ForecastAdvisor, two Django-powered weather websites that aggregate and analyse weather forecasts to compare their accuracy on an ongoing basis. This week, I spoke to Eric about the history behind his sites, how he handles massive data sets, and his conversion from Ruby on Rails to Django. You can read all about it over at the Django Site of the Week.

ShutterCal is a photo sharing site with a difference - it encourages contributors to upload one photo every day to help people reach a goal: whether that may be to improve their photography, watch themselves evolve over a year, or remember people and places they visit. ShutterCal started in 2007, and this week I spoke to developer Dan Ferrante to find out why he chose Django, some of the challenges he's faced, and how he uses Django and other open-source software to make his life easier. You can read more over at the Django Site of the Week.

To better fit with both my own way of doing things and with general web browsing patterns of the Django SOTW public, I'm moving the SOTW to Mondays rather than Saturdays. Also, I've finally succumbed to the forces and I've joined Twitter so you if that's your kinda thing then come and say hi!

Represent is a new website prototype from the New York Times that provides New York residents with information about the whereabouts of their elected representatives. What's interesting about this website is that it's one of the first large-scale sites to implement GeoDjango for spatially-aware applications. This week, I spoke with Derek Willis to get some details on their implementation of a Django project at one of the worlds' most famous newspapers. You can read the entire interview over at the Django site of the Week website.