Efficiently Test Emails in Django

Sunday, July 19 2009 6:08 p.m.

Testing emails can be an inefficient process. The email needs to leave your machine, arrive at the SMTP server, get forwarded to your test mail server and then downloaded by your email client. Do you want those 30 seconds of your life back?

Using an SMTP sink, you can receive the email to your screen instantly. Setup is easy.

•  ♦  Download smtp_sink.py
•  ♦  Put it in whatever your project directory is. You will want to create a "inbox" directory. Besides outputting to the screen, this will automatically copy the email to the inbox directory in case you need to reference it later
•  ♦  Change your settings.py to have: EMAIL_HOST = '127.0.0.1', EMAIL_HOST_USER = '', EMAIL_PORT = 25

If you have a script that loads your sandbox environment automatically, you will want to load smtp_sink.py automatically. It will send a test signal to see if it's already running and not start twice.

If you run automated test scripts, the output of the "inbox" can be tested.

AvaTint Launched!

Tuesday, June 30 2009 11 p.m.

The site very simply takes your avatar and turns it into any color you select. The online community is starting to do this to support and protest many things. This is the 2.0 way of making your page background black for a cause.

We created this site in 90 minutes using Django on June 19th.

Easily Code Templates for iPhone in Django

Monday, May 4 2009 9:49 p.m.

Sometimes, you want to create a custom page for an iPhone or other small phone browser but don't want a custom URL or view for it. This can easily be handled by using the mini_render_to_response function.

Hollywood Draft Private League Launch!

Thursday, April 23 2009 7:52 a.m.

This new game allows you to play in a more traditional fantasy game model where you draft from a pool celebrities. This allows fun things like draft parties, benching players and all the regular things those familiar with fantasy sport already know.

MyEmailDraft.com Launched!

Wednesday, April 22 2009 10 a.m.

The site solves one simple problem. Messy email based fantasy drafts. Our goal was to make something as simple to setup as an email draft but without any of the downside.

Celebrity Fantasy Game in Django

Monday, August 18 2008 9:53 p.m.

If you've played fantasy football or any fantasy sport you know what I'm takling about. If you're new to the concept, you pick a roster of celebrities and if they show up in the news, you get points.

The site was written using Django (trunk as of the 13th!) and Postgres 8.2. We've built a fantasy games package on top of the Django core which we would probably open-source if the community showed some interest in it.

This is our 2nd major site in Django and we really love it. To begin with, Python is a great language. When we built our fantasy engine, it was originally coded on MySQL. We encountered quite a few problems porting it over to Postgres. There are lots of little things where MySQL does type conversions for you automatically and Postgres (correctly in my opinion) does not. I definitely feel the conversion was worth it so that now we're on an enterprise level database.

MySQL Connection Pooling with Django and SQLAlchemy

Friday, July 25 2008 12:41 p.m.

Here's a quick and dirty recipe to get connection caching from SQLAlchemy. This is really not connection pooling as that would require a separate process to only handle connections. All this does is prevent the connection from closing after you finish a query. We're also not replacing the Django ORM.

To give a little more background, normally when you use Django to get to your database, Django will automatically disconnect from the database when the thread is done with that query.

Launching a High Performance Django Site

Sunday, July 6 2008 3:29 p.m.

Are the brakes on your Django app?

When building an application using an application framework like Django... the priority is often to get the application working first and optimize it later. The trade off is between getting it done and getting it done for 1 million users. Here's a check list of things you can do to make sure your application can be optimized quickly when you put on your optimization hat. Note, most applications don't need all of this since most applications do not get anywhere near enough traffic to justify even bothering. But if you're lucky enough to need to optimize your Django app, I hope this post can help you.

MySQL, Dates and Time zones, Postgres and Mindshare

Saturday, May 10 2008 12:27 a.m.

A database can’t be all things to everyone. Each one has its sweet spot. MySQL happens to be the Wal-Mart of the database world. A large market sweet spot with lots of really cheap stuff, questionably good for you and serving a basic need.

Occasionally, MySQL will let you down with some basic things… like time zones.

New Site. Now With 80% More Blog

Thursday, May 1 2008 11:56 p.m.

Hope everyone likes the new updated blog format. Been trying to get this online for several months, but never had enough time to get it just right. It's still not, but it's good enough.

Complete change in technology for the new version. Using Django app framework on top of Python. Python is the most fun coding since SQLWindows (another OOP language with forced language formatting).

Features coming soon... RSS feeds and tagging.