One issue that I have had with this blog for a while has been the lack of notifications when a new, legitimate comment is posted under one of my articles. I don’t get many comments, but when I do, I would like to be able to respond right away. I don’t like email notifications, so when Prowl was announced this week, I was excited about the possibility of sending push notifications to my iPhone whenever a new comment was posted. It turned out to be much easier than I anticipated, thanks to Jacob Burch’s Prowlpy module and Django’s signals framework.
For the past few months, I have been trying out the different schema migration tools for Django. At first, the obvious choice seemed like django-evolution. It was the oldest and the most mature project, and after watching the schema evolution panel from DjangoCon 2008, it was also the one that made most sense in terms of architecture. After working with django-evolution in a few projects though, I found that it did not work well in practice. I have recently been testing South, and it seems like the better choice.
In the past few months, sorl.thumbnail has become one of the standard libraries I always include in my Django projects. It’s unobstrusive and very easy to implement into templates, but my one grief with it has been the lack of capability for doing some custom processing on images. As it turns out, sorl actually allows custom processors to be added. When I found out about this feature, I set out to write some for my current project.
After a few days of work, I finally reached a preliminary release of the little scraping project I mentioned before. I wanted to test this version on my production server, so I deployed it, and immediately started seeing some weird parsing issues with Beautiful Soup.
I started working on a little project for myself today and since it involved parsing some content from a site that doesn’t publish APIs, I turned to Beautiful Soup for help. After a couple of hours of coding, I was already starting to scrape nicely formatted data when I got a parser error!
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