Posts Filed in "How-To's"

A while back I posted a quick, and very simplistic guide to setting up django-sphinx within your project. Since that time we’ve gained a lot of use of the platform. It came to my attention today that the django-nyc group was going to do a presentation on how to setup sphinx within your Django project. [...]

Recently I’ve been incorporating alternative techniques to Captcha to prevent automated form submission on websites, which is typically spam, or something else you don’t want happening. I added our routines to the new iBegin’s submission system today, and thought that I’d share with the world what we’re doing. I’m also curious as to what everyone [...]

Every time I meet someone new who asks me about Django, I tell them exactly what I think. It’s a great product. It does exactly what it’s designed to do. Allows you to build decently structured applications rapidly, without much overhead in doing so. One of the other things I tell them, is that the [...]

Today I went head and finalized our build bot some of our public scripts. These scripts are mostly JavaScript based. I already had the build script zipping the file for tags and trunks of projects within the repository (we store all projects in one repository, instead of one repo per project). There were still a [...]

Recently I took the opportunity to configure my server for per-user hosting (to offer some free hosting to people who needed it). Doing this I had to configure mod_wsgi per-user as well. First, let me say that the documentation is excellent, but real world examples are always very helpful. Below is the output of a [...]

Today a question was raised on how to deploy Django on your server. I figured it’d be useful to put together a quick how-to for deploying Django on your standard LAMP infrastructure. I’m not going to say the way we’ve done things is the best, or if it’s even common, but it’s the way we’ve [...]

Again, I still suck at documentation, and my “tutorials” aren’t in-depth enough. So hopefully this covers all of the questions regarding using the django-sphinx module.

We ran across a fun gotcha today while performance testing some code. The issue was originally discovered when we noticed a 300ms query taking 20 seconds. After about an hour of debugging we found the issue to be with aliases in table locks.
Here’s what our original SQL looked like:

LOCK TABLES files_versiondownloadcount WRITE;
 
UPDATE files_version AS version, [...]

It seems I suck at documentation (yes, It’s very true), so here’s a quick How-to on using the Sphinx ORM for Django we created:

One issue I’ve personally had to overcome with Django, and languages which aren’t specifically designed for the web, is that you don’t have access to the environment everywhere. The environment I’m referring to, is the current request, and response objects.
In PHP there is no response object, at least not one as you would see in [...]