Entries for archive: 2009-12

Found 4 entries.

Ready to Migrate old Blog Posts Over

A recent commit on Lollysite has enabled me to import old blog posts from my other sites. Yep, you heard right, I’m going to concentrate all my blogging prowess here.

This includes my old entries from:

I hope that once the migrations are done, and I redirect the traffic from those sites here, I’ll be more consistently posting. Also, I’m reaching the stage where I’m understanding AppEngine a little more and actually have less things to do for Lollysite now.

BTW, I’m now also writing my blog entries in Textile instead of my proprietary (but open source) wiki markup Phliky

It’s very nice. Finally, I find a wiki-type markup language I like.

Labels: phliky, textile, appengine, blog, kapiti-geek-nz, retire-at-40

Inserted: 2009-12-23 09:32 (7 months, 1 week ago)

Release of v0.03 of Lollysite

Just a short announcement to say that v0.03 of Lollysite has been released.

See the releases page for more info.

In other news, Lollysite now has an Ohloh page. From here you can also download all the previous releases too.

Of course, there is always the source code repository on Gitorious too.

For the Future

For v0.04, I have penned in a number of features such as:

 3f656b91   Finished     Make site feed at top level
 65d73568   New          Add new section layouts - Featured Node (or equivalent)
 96d842e8   New          Serve file uploads (or any node with data) from it's own section
 a4c0e80f   New          Add a 'FlickrImage' node type
 ac70e68c   New          Add new ways to render each node
 cf3a93db   New          Make the section and node edit screens present all the attributes to the user
 dfb824e5   InProgress   Make images (files, etc) assets rather than nodes

So, having three releases in two weeks has been a lot of fun (release early, release often) though I suspect v0.04 will be a couple of weeks away. Christmas/New Year and complexity will make it a bit further out. Also, I'm going to use the new BlobStore API. All good fun :)

(Ends)

Labels: lollysite, appengine, ohloh

Inserted: 2009-12-21 06:43 (7 months, 1 week ago)

Things I Like about AppEngine

SO far, I've been enjoying playing with AppEngine. It's been a long process for me, since I've been learning Python at the same time, but very productive I think.

I just thought I'd give a quick list about what I like about AppEngine. However, please not that very soon I'll also be doing a "What I Don't Like about AppEngine".

  • quick and easy development environment (one command to start the server listening on a local port)
  • simple deployment process (one command to upload the application, update indexes and task queues)
  • versioning on the server side, so you can run something like 'stable' and 'experimental' all against the same datastore
  • simple logging, import logging then they capture any logging.info() etc statements into the AppEngine console
  • sending email is pretty easy too mail.send_mail(to, from, subject, body) makes it nice and simple to alert someone
  • no sysadmin maintenance to do! This is a big bonus for me not having to keep servers up to date

... and finally, this isn't really a feature of the platform, but just being allowed to play around with a schemaless datastore has been a whole heap of fun.

Other Sites for Lollysite

I also thought I'd mention that Lollysite is now being used for both chilts.org and the new KohaCon sites. In fact, to get the other theme going wasn't really that hard but better than that, I didn't actually have to change that much in Lollysite itself.

Labels: appengine, python

Inserted: 2009-12-12 19:59 (7 months, 2 weeks ago)

Site now on AppEngine

It's been a long time coming, but recently I've been learning a lot about Google AppEngine.

It's been a very interesting journey too. Not only have I been learning Python but I've also started a new interest in schemaless datastores (key/value stores, whatever you want to call them).

I even gave a short and unprepared presentation to Wellington PerlMongers about one called Redis. That one looks my favourite so far but yeah, my interest started with AppEngine's Datastore.

Schemaless Datastores

So far I'm enjoying playing with AppEngine's datastore though I find there are some things which are quite finicky about it, mainly due to the Python classes that are being used to help stick data in and get it back out again. Migrations of datastore entities seem to be difficult or as yet some of the techniques to do it are unknown to me (though I have started a list of techniques to help).

Otherwise, once you get your head around not only the data being schemaless but duplicating data so that you can get faster speed and more scaleability, then you're on to a winner. Relations like in a tradition RDBMS are also out of the window though you can reference other objects so it's not completely gone.

Things about AppEngine

Again, so far most things about AppEngine I like, though there seems to be a few things which are harder than necessary.

I managed to find a peculiar bug in AppEngine the other day but still no answer on the Google Group. This is particularly weird as far as I can tell.

And of course, the perenial problem that if something is wrong with AppEngine, all of the developers at Google seem to disappear. And then appear with "Nothing was wrong". Whilst I understand why they do it, it's not great customer relations.

Yet at the same time, the pull of running a site on someone else's servers, that they administer and you don't have to do lots of SysAdmin work, is too great to be ignored. As to whether I'd use it for Mission Critical Applications yet, I don't know.

Overall, it's been a fun (if longer than expected) experience but I'm happy with it so far.

Finally, the CMS/Blog I have written is called Lollysite and check out the project home on Gitorious.

Labels: appengine, python, perlmongers, redis, google

Inserted: 2009-12-06 05:18 (7 months, 3 weeks ago)