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Some new features for my ...

27-09-2009 tags: blog discworld django twitter

I finally managed to release some new stuff on my website. Honestly, finishing things is really hard it seems. Even though it's been in the pipeline for quite some time, quite a bit of the code feels rushed and ugly, but I'm glad it's finally here.

There's a timeline with tweets, bookmarks and blog entries. I'm not a very avid tweeter unless I'm at an event or something similar, but the concept of making a micropost from just about everywhere is nice. So I used Python Twitter to conjure up a bit of an ugly twitter django app. Very much something too ugly to ever see the public light of day.

My bookmarks are ever increasing. Every time I browse along something shiny, I bookmark it. So I thought it would be interesting to share some of that for all the webspiders visiting my site. I've got about twelvehundred bookmarks in my Firefox. I won't bother you with all of them, but I'll look into the dusty archives if there are some interesting links I could put on here too.

I've also thrown some tagging juice on top of it all using the Django tagging app. I feel that this app does have some rough edges, but not enough for me to try and reinvent the wheel again.

Next up for this site is some refactoring of the Discworld Mud bits. Nearly all of the content there isn't public, and the public bit seems to run into some performance issues. I really shouldn't need a database table with nearly fourty million rows, but recording information about every player on the mud every five minutes does seem to add up. A fairly big table in combination with using the smallest available VPS with XLS hosting is really bogging down stuff.

After I whipped the discworld "top 10 online players last week" in shape a bit I'll intend to do a more complete refactor. Let's see how long that will take... :)


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"Laatste loodjes"

15-09-2009 tags: blog

"De laatste loodjes wegen het zwaarst" - a Dutch proverb

Not very surprisingly the last bit that gets left over from my to-do list for a release of some new stuff for this website is some graphical/CSS bit. :)


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Django Deployment, Mushishi &

09-08-2009 tags: blog

Since I'm a complete lazy arse and haven't done any blog posts, I'll just give a summary of the things I've been working on in the last weeks.

I've been working on figuring out a good deployment system for Django applications. A lot has been written about this and there are loads of examples around. None of them seem to get everything right, though. So I'm trying to cherry pick all the good bits out of ideas I read about. Trying to fit in the concept of different stages (development, testing, quality assurance and production) in there as well.

I'll be sure to write something up by the time I've figured most of that out and tested it a bit as well. After that I'll probably try to get this website to fit into that mold as well.

As for other stuff. Been watching some episodes of the anime Mushishi for a bit. I have to say that it's a quite intriguing series. It's nice that most episodes are separate stories, so I don't feel compelled to watch them all at once. :)


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Spring is in the air

13-04-2009 tags: blog photo

Spring is in the air!

Walking around a bit this friday I snapped these 2 pictures. Over 20 degrees Celsius it was and to think that I was snowboarding only a week earlier. :)

A tree blossoming

A close-up of a flower


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Moved again

16-03-2009 tags: blog

Yeah, yeah... It took quite a while, but this site is now hosted at XLS hosting. Better bandwidth and less latency compared to Slicehost. I'll probably fiddle around a bit more with the server in the next few days too.


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Moved server

11-01-2009 tags: blog

Well, I currently moved the server to slice hosts. I probably will move it to XLS hosting in the future. Quite a few things will be defunct or odd.


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