A lightning talk by Thijs Jonkman at the Dutch Plone User Day once again brought Compass to my attention. I’ve read about it on other occasions, but I never actually tried it. But Thijs really wet my appetite.

On June 16th Jan-Jaap Driessen from The Health Agency (THA) organised a meeting to share knowledge about using Puppet, zc.buildout, release management and how those are related. For the most part, Jan-Jaap showed us his setup. My impression in one word: wow! They are running a tight ship at THA!

A tale of how I learned about PostgreSQL sequence generators the hard way.

One of the things that was still on my wish list for this site, was a proper search. In two articles I will explain how I’ve done this. The previous article described why I picked Djapian. This article focusses on some of the technical aspects of my setup.

One of the things that was still on my wish list for this site, was a proper search. In two articles I will explain how I’ve done this. The next article will describe the way I have currently set things up. This article will primarily focus on the journey I made to come to my choice (Djapian).

Initially I was a bit sceptic about Fabric. After all, I’m already using buildout to manage projects. “How much better can it get?” After watching the video of the Django Deployment Workshop (held by Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2010 Atlanta), I finally decided to see for myself what Fabric is all about.

Google’s Webmaster Tools provide the modern webmaster/developer with some nice tools to improve a website and the way the site is indexed. In this article I’ll focus on the crawler related tools. Specifically, how they helped me when I migrated from Plone to Django.

After this website migrated from Plone to Django, the comment spammers found my site more interesting. Instead of five spam comments a year, I suddenly got the same amount per week. Although those comments were never published (more on that later), it did annoy me. By no longer displaying the comment form below the blog entries, the problem of the spam seems to be solved. While this wasn’t my goal, it is a nice side effect.

When migrating from Plone to Django, I had problems with editing weblog entries with a dot in the url. Apparently Django doesn’t allow dots in a SlugField. Here’s how I solved it.

In April Packt published Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging by Karen M. Tracey. After reading it I figured I might as well write a review.