Migrated blog to Coltrane
After restoring my site back to functional status after the recent fiasco with my VPS provider, I decided I'd migrate my blog and some of my other web applications over to more "off the shelf" software options. I wrote the blog application as my first Django app to really learn the framework. The blog has grown to meet my needs, but since I really have no excitement about writing the best blog software, it never got some of the features a modern blog really does deserve (e.g. RSS). Even some of my basic features like 'tagging' of my blog posts were more hackish (Context variables), since they were put into place before some of the best of breed techniques were really developed. Anyway... as it stands right now, the software running the blog is Coltrane along with some other apps.
The Coltrane app has pretty non-existent web documentation. When I'm done with the migration, I'll write a HOWTO document describing how I deployed Coltrane and migrated my site to use it.
Back online-again
I had some issues with my last virtual host provider which ended up having my site down for an extended period of time. It's now back and running with an old backup of the site. I'll be working to get it back fully operational when I have the time. I'm using the minor-fiasco as an opportunity to improve on some of the aspects of the site as I go. One of the first things I'll likely do is abandon this blog software. It was a really useful first django project to help teach me Django, but it's pretty light on features and I really don't want to be spending my time re-inventing the blog.
P.S. I realize I committed the cardinal sin of sysadm-ing of not having a good backup of important data (e.g. the website). Nothing reminds you of the importance of that until you loose some important data (for me, it wasn't even this site that was most painful to loose, it was my subversion repository... ouch!)
PyCon 2007 Session and Conference Notes
My notes from the recent PyCon 2007 are now available. PyCon remains the best conference I've attended, beating Usenix, SAGE, Blackhat, DefCon, RSA, and Network World/Interop.Posted Xen talk presented to CTLUG
A month or so ago I gave a talk to the Central Texas Linux Users Group on operating system virtualization focusing primarily on Xen. I've finally gotten around to posting the slides I used during the talk. Note though that a lot of the really interesting bits of the presention was done during the live demo.
WAM's Firefox Extensions
I've just posted the list of browser extensions I currently use within Firefox.
more details in the full article
(full article)My first greasemonkey script
I wrote my first Greasemonkey script to customize the behavior of another person's site today. This also happens to be the first little bit of Javascript I've written entirely on my own (prior Javascript I've worked on have been tweaks to other people's code). The script tweaks the <title> of pages on the Django web site for better accomodation to my browser tab size. More details are on my writeup on the Django Wiki.
